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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23994304">When the Sun Hits</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/jcavero/pseuds/jcavero'>jcavero</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Romance, Backstory, Character Study, Complicated Relationships, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Introspection, Mild Sexual Content, Mutual Pining, Post-Resident Evil 2 remake, Psychological Trauma, Resident Evil 2 Remake Inspired, Slow Romance, Survivor Guilt</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 21:08:54</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>28,359</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23994304</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/jcavero/pseuds/jcavero</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>She knows better than he does, that nothing this good lasts and there's no redemption for the wicked. But what would it look like if she tried?</p><p>-</p><p>Ada and Leon reunite on the east coast and navigate old memories and unresolved questions from four years ago. They try to build something together, while it lasts.</p><p>Or: What if Ada gave up the spy life after Raccoon City.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Leon S. Kennedy/Ada Wong</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>139</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>120</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. movie screen</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Based on the RE2 remake. Light on plot. Headcanon-heavy.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>with sky as ceiling,<br/>
ground as home,<br/>
we can call the stranger<br/>
<em>lover</em><br/>
and the earth<br/>
<em>ours</em><br/>
at least for a little while.<br/>
- Dina L. Relles, <strong>Campfire</strong></p><hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>They saved each other three times the night of the outbreak, that was how they met. After a few hours together, they made a joke of it. <em>Didn’t realize we were keeping score</em>. That night, she stopped an attack dog bearing down on his chest, a monster choking him in midair, blood from a bullet wound on his upper arm. That night, he took a bullet for her. He pulled a metal shard from her thigh, dressed it in gauze and pressed his palm to her skin. <em>I can do it myself</em>, she’d said but she let him look after her. It had been a long time since she had let anyone look after her. Ada remembers the way he bent forward, fringe falling into his eyes, tending to the wound and how he helped her stand. It was the same night he told her, <em>I've got you</em>, held her hand over a bridge that they were supposed to cross together. </p>
<p>When the bridge collapsed, the only person it took was her. This boy who tried to pull her up as the world burned to the ground above them. She lived, so in her book, he still got the point for that one.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>It’s where they meet after four years, Kinokuya bookstore, both of them in the Japanese bakery upstairs. It is summer, late July. The smell of sugary bread and grilled salmon fills the second floor and it is like childhood wrapped around her. Sometimes she goes there just for that. </p>
<p>It wouldn’t come to Ada until later, much later, that old Chinese myth. The red string of fate, invisibly twined from a person’s index finger at birth, threaded out to so many other people they would meet as they got older. Not everyone stayed. It wasn’t about love. At least, not always. She knew the string could tangle and stretch, but it could never break.</p>
<p>Meaning, you choose how to knit the story. Between you, and another.</p>
<p>He recognized her first. She was far away, reaching for a woman who looked like her sister. Shoulder-length black hair, square frame glasses, red overcoat. She stopped herself because she knew this was another symptom of grief. Five years since her sister’s death, and did it get any easier? They say time is the healer, but Ada spent most of it looking for signs. A whole month went by when every insect, every robin, every flower that turned its face up to hers was a sign from the after. In spring, she watched spotted beetles rise to her windowsill and let their larvae nest in her woolen sweaters, felt for the tiny holes where they had eaten like it was proof her sister was here.</p>
<p>She heard an intake of breath behind her, a voice saying <em>Ada</em>, saying <em>Is it you?</em> The voice was familiar, gentle. That’s how she knew.</p>
<p>She pulled her eyes up to him and there he was. Dark blonde, pale-blue eyed boy. His jaw was tensed.</p>
<p>“I don’t understand,” he said. </p>
<p>“Leon.”</p>
<p>“I saw you fall. I saw you die.”</p>
<p>His words cut her and she felt it as if it were happening again. Her body numbed from the waist down and she couldn’t trust what lay below, what was holding her up. She leaned into a glass display of figurines, of comic book girls with stars in their hair. She crossed her arms. She tried to play it off.</p>
<p>“You have a good memory,” she said.</p>
<p>“Not really something you forget.”</p>
<p>“Right.”</p>
<p>“Ada. What happened to you?”</p>
<p>He was carrying a plastic bag from the bookstore and he didn’t reach out. She wondered if he remembered that too, her aversion to men touching her without asking. If he wanted to drop his hand to her arm, or hold her face up to his, she wouldn’t have stopped him.</p>
<p>“I can’t do this here,” she said.</p>
<p>“Yeah. Of course.”</p>
<p>His gaze passed over her, from face to stockinged feet, her black loafers with silver jewels like she was in school again. She thought of how his hands would feel on her wrist and his last words, <em>I’ve got you</em>. To anyone else, they would have looked like hundreds of couples crossing the street together in Manhattan, on their way home. And how wrong they would have been.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Bryant Park was close, so they found a bench on a gravel path and sat next to each other. The giant lawn was full of people splayed out on blankets. It was movie night, and Goodfellas was playing. </p>
<p>Leon placed his shopping bag next to the side so there was nothing between them.</p>
<p>“Anything good?” Ada said. “From Kinokuniya.”</p>
<p>“Oh. Just a gift.” He showed her the cover, <em>Coraline</em> by Neil Gaiman. A quote above the title read: <em>One of the most frightening books ever written.</em> </p>
<p>“Didn’t think you’d be a fan of horror,” she said.</p>
<p>He laughed. “Trust me, I’m not. It’s for a friend.”</p>
<p>On the curb behind them, a woman covered in pink and lavender tulle posed for her picture. Every move was practiced.</p>
<p>“Ada,” he said, and she turned to him. “I don’t even know where to start.” </p>
<p>“Do your worst,” she said. The last time they had seen each other, she had a fake FBI ID, waved it around like she had authority over him, wore a khaki trench coat and glasses. She gave orders. She mixed fiction and truth. She kissed him and he took her in, like her mouth was scripture, believed every word until he didn’t. This time, she tried to find something honest. “Go ahead.”</p>
<p>“Okay,” he said. “How did you make it out of there?”</p>
<p>In the seconds before she answered, she tallied everything that had tried to kill her and failed: ex-boyfriends, the infected, alcohol, car accidents, the ocean, herself.</p>
<p>When the doctors asked what happened to her, after the accident, she was mute. For days, memory splintered. She remembered only the falling. Her limbs and hair floating up as if through water, her stomach rising. The soar of wind at the back of her neck. Like she was being carried away somewhere. And then the dark.</p>
<p>“The water. If it hadn’t been there, I’d just be… The doctors said I was a one-off. Lucky. That was the word they used.”</p>
<p>A family pushed their stroller down the path, and a little girl walked over to peer at some tulips behind the bench. Ada waited until they left. </p>
<p>“I had broken bones. But the adrenaline, you know. I swam until I was out and walked until I couldn’t.”</p>
<p>“Jesus.”</p>
<p>“So physical therapy was fun, as you can imagine.” </p>
<p>She stopped herself from saying it. How in the hospital, one of the first memories when she woke up was him.</p>
<p>“How are you doing now?” he asked.</p>
<p>She nodded. “Better. Yeah. How’s the shoulder?”</p>
<p>He brought his hand up to his left shoulder and watched her. “Better,” he said. “Sometimes I can still feel it though.”</p>
<p>“The bullet?”</p>
<p>“Everything.” There was a dull buzzing before he checked his phone, texted something and snapped it shut. “I’m sorry.”</p>
<p>“It’s fine.” Ada glanced at the movie screen where Robert de Niro was embracing another man and back at Leon. He wasn’t wearing a uniform, just a white shirt and black jeans. He pocketed his phone and she could see the blue veins on his forearm where the sleeves were rolled up.</p>
<p>Cut to: him lifting her to stand after patching her up, and she’d imagined it. She was good at that, determining what a man would be like in bed, upon the first few seconds of meeting. How he would tuck her against his side, hold her as if to keep her from falling. She remembered how he tried to drape her arm around his shoulder to help her walk, but at the last second she pulled away, said <em>don’t push it, rookie,</em> but she’d smiled at him then.</p>
<p>Skin hunger, she’s heard it called. An unbearable need for touch.</p>
<p>“Let’s go for a walk?” he said.</p>
<p>On a curved path, they passed more rows of white tulips and listened to the audience laugh with Ray Liotta and his gangsters. </p>
<p>“I can’t stand this movie,” Leon said.</p>
<p>“Not a fan of violent crime dramas, hm?”</p>
<p>“Pretty much.”</p>
<p>“You do know that was the whole point of the film? All the bad guys turning on each other. Everyone gets fucked.” She knew this first hand.</p>
<p>“I get it, I just don’t want to sit through it for 3 hours.”</p>
<p>They turned onto the Village, sidestepping vomit outside a ramen bar. The sour smell of alcohol from the night before hung thick over this street. She asked if he was still a cop, hoping he wasn’t. Back then, before they’d given their names, she’d counted that against him. Strike one, he was white. Strike two, police. When you’re a Chinese-Japanese woman in this country, neither type of man is to be trusted.</p>
<p>“Detective now,” he said. “Homicide.” </p>
<p>“Ah.”</p>
<p>He gave her a look, almost smiling. “What?”</p>
<p>“Honestly. I thought you would have quit. After the incident.”</p>
<p>His expression hardened. “I did, for months.”</p>
<p>“Is there a story behind that?” she asked.</p>
<p>“Yeah, just not for right now.”</p>
<p>They waited at a crossing light with tourists and their rolling suitcases, children and their light-up balloons. By the time they sat down at Irving Farm, they had exchanged the ordinary details of their lives. They lived a half hour drive from his Upper West Side apartment to her studio in Flushing. She told him about her part-time work as a figurative model and dog walker. As they cut across streets, the sun gilded the edges of him and his hair in gold. The whole time, Ada tracked their shadows on the pavement. </p>
<p>She didn’t push him for more details. He never brought up her past as an amateur spy. <em>Fair</em>, she thought. She was glad to not talk about it, to leave that woman behind and convince herself, for now, they could bury what she had done. That they could begin again. </p>
<p>As if it could all work with the press of a button. Rewind, press play. This time, with feeling. Here is the part where she says, <em>Hi</em>.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. entrance wound</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Some days, Ada is convinced she has died in the sewers. Here in this body, she remains, her soul stuck to this dying earth.</p>
<p>A cosmic oversight, she thinks.</p>
<p>The doctors have told her this is what happened: in her shocked state, she was found limping onto a quiet, two-lane road. She passed out, was dropped off on the hospital steps by some Good Samaritan.</p>
<p>She can't remember this part, like the memory belongs to another person. A birth memory, too early to imprint in her brain as something other than noise, a blur of color.</p>
<p>On the nights she can't sleep, her right ear is filled with shrill, ringing bells. Sometimes she can push away the sound with the force of her thoughts. Dog parks. Sunsets. The crinkle of newsprint under a charcoal stick. Most nights she just listens. Imagines the sea. Dark as oil, full of teeth.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Once, on 5<sup>th</sup> Avenue, she touched the lions of Patience and Fortitude at the steps of the library and remembered the boy's name. <em>Leon</em>, she said to no one, and stood before the beasts, as if by calling his name, she could call him into being. From stone to flesh.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>In the cafe, he opens his palms on the table. She touches the tips of his fingers. They are warm, lightly calloused. She presses into his lifelines, tries to discern which one tracks his heart or his future, even though she can't guess at any of it. She runs her nails over those lines. She hopes they are endless.</p>
<p>Leon's voice is barely-there soft. He closes his fingers over her hands. “How are you, really?” he asks, and she knows he means, how do you move on, how do you go on living after what we lived through? The truth is, she still doesn’t know.</p>
<p>“Loaded question,” she answers.</p>
<p>And yet here they are again: alive.</p>
<p>His hair falls over his eyebrows when he tries to push it back. It makes him look younger than he is, like he hasn't aged since Raccoon City. Ada thinks about how surviving a violent thing can freeze a part of you in that day forever, gets stored like a bullet in the body. How the body remembers before the mind does. She lies and tells him she is okay.</p>
<p>Leon makes a steeple with his hands, covers his face. He wipes his eyes.</p>
<p>“What about you?” she asks.</p>
<p>He makes a harsh sound, not quite a laugh. “I’m here, aren’t I?”</p>
<p><em>Every day you are here is a fucking miracle</em>, she wants to say. She picks at her nails under the table and a waitress comes by to fill their glasses with water. The menus stay untouched.</p>
<p>“You know what I’m going to ask next,” he says.</p>
<p>A chill runs through her. She straightens, clocks the nearest exit because this is muscle memory now. Ingrained for life.</p>
<p>“About?” she says.</p>
<p>“What happened that day, in the lab.”</p>
<p>“Leon—”</p>
<p>“The virus sample.”</p>
<p>“I can’t—”</p>
<p>“Why. Why did you do it?” His eyes are blue and wide and searching.</p>
<p>“Ada, talk to me,” he says.</p>
<p>Something lurches in her heart. She can’t move. “Are you really going to make me do this now? Right now?”</p>
<p>“Why’d you risk your life for something—”</p>
<p>She smacks the table. At a nearby booth, an older couple frowns at them. The cashier clears his throat. Ada keeps her voice low but she can feel herself shaking. “I don’t… I don’t talk about that. Ever. That part of my life? It’s over now. End of story.”</p>
<p>They are quiet for a while and Leon sighs, as if taking her words on faith alone. She knows it won’t last. It wouldn’t be the first time. His stare cuts through her and she looks away. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.”</p>
<p>When the waitress returns, they assume their roles. Carry the script. Old friends, prospective lovers. They brighten their voices for the waitress. He orders a macchiato, she gets a chai tea.</p>
<p>Dusk falls in from the window, casts half of Leon’s face in a burnished light. He could be a portrait. Ada sips her tea and it is too sweet.</p>
<p>After they finish, he reaches across the table and again their fingertips touch. He slides his palms under hers and then his eyes drop to her ring. Princess-cut. Blue as lake water. He looks up at her.</p>
<p>“March stone,” she says, pulling away.</p>
<p>“Are you…”</p>
<p>“Married? God no. It was my sister’s. Before she died.” Ada shreds the empty sugar sachets into pink strips. She taps a spoon on the edge of her plate, lets it fall with a clatter. A siren whines nearby, and she thinks of the person in the back of the ambulance, being wheeled into a shock-white room and she can’t know if they will live or if they will die.</p>
<p>“I’m sorry,” Leon says.</p>
<p>Ada swipes at the corner of her eye. “She was unwell for a long time,” she says, and leaves it at that.</p>
<p>Or else she would say, <em>And I didn’t think about it. I never asked</em>. By unwell, she meant sad. She meant unreachable. Those times her sister would say, “I’m not feeling well today” and sleep through the weekend, resist Ada’s attempts to talk to her through a shut door. Ada was the oldest one by five years. After illness had claimed their mother, it was her job to know how to manage, to take care.</p>
<p>“I’m so sorry,” Leon says and neither of them speaks until the small plates and cups are cleared away. A bell chimes when the front door opens and closes.</p>
<p>He touches her wrist and she wants to bring every part of him to her mouth. <em>Erase me here. Please.</em></p>
<p>“Look. Everything that’s happened,” he says and clasps her hands like a promise. “You’re here. I’m just glad you’re here.”</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>In a dream she has, she is holding her sister’s body, soaked to the bone. Ada traces the curve of her sister's cheek, brushes the snow from her eyelashes. <em>Take care of each other</em>, she hears her mother say.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>On the 7 train, they stand together at a metal pole, holding on. They don’t speak or touch. Ada watches her reflection smear behind him in the glass. It’s what she likes most about riding the train, seeing the apparition of herself there, shapeless, everywhere and nowhere at once.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>She remembers a fortune she pulled from a cookie months ago. <em>Falling is a fine art</em>, it said. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” she said, and shredded the fortune, tossed it away.</p>
<p>The words come back to her now, on the train. As more passengers get on, she is forced to move in, close enough that she can see his exposed neck, the scattering of tiny brown dots across his skin. She can smell his shampoo and behind that, gunpowder, coffee.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>This isn’t his usual route, he admits. But he is willing to accompany her up to a point. In her past life, she might have refused the gesture. She has never trusted Good Samaritans, knows every man comes with an agenda or a bribe. All her life, men looked over her body as if to decide which parts were useful and what have they ever done except take?</p>
<p>She has been proven right on so many counts. Until she met him. She swallows her pride, thinks, <em>Fine. I’ll give you this, I’ll let you in. Maybe.</em></p>
<p>*</p>
<p>At Court Square, Leon says <em>let’s keep in touch. </em>He gives her his card and without reading it, Ada slips it into her purse, decides she will never look at it again and go home, back to her little life, a life she has tried very hard to cultivate with order and as much quiet as possible. Routine, marked only by her part-time jobs, occasional hangovers at the club and the changing of the weather.</p>
<p>They go their separate ways on the street, Leon disappearing into the crowds on 21<sup>st</sup>. Ada watches him leave, expecting him to turn around, but he doesn’t.</p>
<p>She returns to the subway, takes it all the way to Roosevelt, takes the bus home.</p>
<p>She blames him for the return of the ache in her right shoulder. In the bath, she runs her fingers across the scarred ghost of stitches from where a bullet had pierced through. The entrance wound. It reminds her of everything too, and not just that night.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I found that I can't write anything unless I have hours of music beamed into my brain. And it's been helping me get through, the music (I have an Ada playlist, a Leon playlist, and a LeonxAda playlist LOL) and the writing. So I'll be doing weekly updates from here on out!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. the world is a vampire</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>CW: This chapter mentions suicide.<br/>Childhood backstory &amp; spy-backstory headcanons ahead.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>After three months in the hospital, when she was able to walk, Ada was placed in group therapy. At sessions, she listened to other patients recall details of the outbreak, how they had seen their parents and best friends struggle to breathe. How they had seen their beloveds turn deranged, wild as a predator in the dark.</p>
<p>The patients tried to reason how it wasn’t their real Mom, wasn’t their real Dad, wasn’t their baby sister. Couldn’t be. Or maybe the real them was trapped and aware of the thing they were becoming, like a patient who wakes during surgery, and feels their body split open.</p>
<p>Sometimes they were encouraged to share pleasant memories of everyone they’d lost. When it was Ada’s turn, she had nothing to say. Leaves spun in tiny whirlwinds out the barred window, scraps of red and orange and brown. She wanted to stand outside in the garden and burn.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>She didn’t lose her sister to the virus. By the time Ada had moved to Chicago for work, nine months before the outbreak, she made it a point to avoid close friendships. In the years after, she did not talk about her family to anyone.</p>
<p>Safer, she thought, to keep something for herself.</p>
<p>In the last year of her life, her sister Hana was eighteen. She was a painter and her medium was oil. In classes, she painted women in burnt tones. She loved their faces, said she wanted to make them massive as landscapes.</p>
<p>The last time she saw her sister, Ada was visiting from their childhood home in Jersey. It had been a while since her sister had wanted to go out and be around other people outside of work and school. <em>It’ll be good for you</em>, Ada used to say. So she didn’t question it when her sister called one week and said, “80s night at Pyramid Club. We should go.”</p>
<p>At home, Ada dug through bathroom cabinets for their mother’s old bottles of Aqua Net. She brought a weekend bag full of clothes in sheer black and velvet, gossamer-light slip dresses, zip pouches with jewelry: rosaries and her favorite chokers. If they were going back in time, she wanted them to live the part. She would do her sister’s makeup. She would tease her hair, comb it high.</p>
<p>Hana lived in a tiny bedroom in Queens. Her roommate was out so they had the kitchen to themselves, pregamed with two bottles of peach-flavored soju and Tito’s until they felt floaty and light. Their hair smelled poisonous. Hana tried not to laugh as Ada blended her sister’s eye shadow, traced her waterlines in white.</p>
<p>“Voila. You are now Siouxsie Sioux,” Ada said when she was done.</p>
<p>They took another shot. In the bathroom mirror, they were banshees, red-lipped, high nests of hair. Hana leaned over the sink and put her face close to the glass. “This is waterproof, right?”</p>
<p>“Yeah. So you can’t cry it off,” Ada said. “Not tonight.”</p>
<p>Her sister opened her mouth and closed it as if to say something, stared down at the sink. Toothpaste had crusted green in the bowl. Her soap dish was filthy.</p>
<p>“Mom would be so pissed,” she said, smiling. “Us, looking like this.”</p>
<p>“Yeah, well. She was a hard ass,” Ada said, “At least you would get away with it,” and her sister laughed, knew it was true.</p>
<p>Ada thought of the night from her teenage years, not her finest hour, when she had jumped from the bedroom window to meet a boy she liked at a bus stop, had sprained her ankle on the way down. He had to carry her home, after they had kissed in the gold cone of a streetlamp. When he left, Hana opened the door for her older sister, helped her up the stairs and there was Mom, sitting on a hard-backed chair with questions, her voice rising.</p>
<p><em>What kind of person are you trying to be exactly</em>? she had asked.</p>
<p>In the morning, she combed the knots and curled-up leaves out her daughter’s hair. Ada leaned into her mother’s hands, the only time her mother ever touched her with anything like kindness.</p>
<p>The night of the party, Ada gave her sister one of the rosaries, zipped the back of her dress. On a mini boombox, Sisters of Mercy played “Marian” while Ada fitted a velvet choker around her neck and checked her wallet. ID card, enough cash. This was their night. She would pay for everything.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>What Ada remembers from those early years: holding her up for Halloween pictures, her baby sister, a cheetah cub in a spotted onesie toddling in the foyer. This was back in the 80s, the real thing. Ada was Dracula’s daughter and in the mirror, she bared her glow-in-the-dark fangs, spread her silky cape. Growing up, she was good at this, adopting masks and voices from characters on TV or characters she made up. What power there was, in being anyone else.</p>
<p>Even now, it is her best performance.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>At Pyramid, they joined kids in neon headbands and the moms with permed hair on the dance floor. Purple strobe lights spun on the walls. The club was foggy and packed. Someone’s drink sloshed on Ada’s dress but she didn’t care. From the TV screens, Bowie sang his moonage daydreams just for them. They danced until they threw up in the bathroom. They chased each other to the basement, from the 80s floor to the Goth room, squeezing by twin mohawked boys in black lipstick down the stairs. When “Happy House” came on, they were trashed, eyes wet. They jumped with a circle of girls. They smelled like weed and sweat. Ada grabbed her sister’s arm and raised it to the ceiling and all of them screamed <em>there is no hell</em>.</p>
<p>That night, they slept in Hana’s bed and Ada remembers the shape of her sister’s back, the weight of her body beside her own. When she closed her eyes, she felt the room as it was falling, the way things do when you’re drunk and dizzy. She pretended their bed was a raft in the middle of the sea. The waves beneath them were so still.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>The police knocked on her door in winter. December 5<sup>th</sup>. The coroner determined it was a suicide. People saw her on the Brooklyn Bridge. It happened a week after Ada left.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>She remembers waking in her sister’s room the next morning. She remembers seeing her hair stuck to the pillow, how she thought of it as evidence. How she sat up in bed, shoulders heavy. Watched the square of sunlight on the hardwood floor. She took an inventory of all that was left. All the documents she would need to sort through later and decide whether to shred or keep. She touched everything there: a metal tin of paintbrushes, gold bracelets, envelopes and every rolled up newsprint sheet, dusted with charcoal. Penciled faces of women, red dresses in the closet, the glass of water on the bedside table, the glass of water on the shelf. All these things because her sister had touched them. She took everything home.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>In New York, there are at least 2,000 bridges. Ada has not visited any of them since she moved here. If a cab dares to cross one above water, she will demand for the driver to turn around, will demand to be let out immediately. Her own two legs or the subway. This is how she gets around. She prefers the descent below the earth or the distant rumbling of passing trains below her feet, secure in the knowledge of where she stands, a firm point on a map she can identify and say, <em>here. I am here now. I am alive.</em></p>
<p>*</p>
<p>In the shower, she stands under a torch of water, scrubs the entrance wound scar on her shoulder as if she could rub it clean off, like ink. On the train, she prepares for work by studying poses in The Guide to Drawing. She examines tiny crosshatches, the long lines of arm and leg. She flips to the section on portraits, finds her sister’s favorite artists. Toulouse-Lautrec. Egon Schiele. Cassatt.</p>
<p>“No woman has the right to draw like that,” Degas said, when he saw what Cassatt could do with a brush.</p>
<p>Ada lingers on the paintings of Cassatt's women, mothers holding babies in the folds of their skirts, mothers holding babies over their shoulders, and then she slams the book shut.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>In the art room, the instructor begins with gesture lessons, one-minute poses Ada twists and arches into. She sits encircled by easels and round-faced students, all of them watching her, all of them tracing through-lines from her head to her feet. On paper, her face is a gray cloud.</p>
<p>She thinks in irony. How those first months at the hospital prepared her for this, the four-hour poses, lying stationary, being watched. She is aware of every muscle, the sweat dripping down her back, the tension in her arms when she raises them over her head like a dancer, every slow breath. Warrior pose, this is called.</p>
<p>She treasures the thought. Her body, this weapon.</p>
<p>When was the last time she had used it like one?</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>1997, Chicago. She took an Executive Assistant job, full-time at Umbrella Corp, that pharmaceutical giant. Their sleeping pills helped during the months after her sister’s funeral. “Just give me drugs,” she had told her physician. “Something like a brick to the head. That’s what I need.”</p>
<p>Umbrella’s website didn’t ask for someone with a background in chemical engineering. Their ideal applicant, instead, was a woman who could manage calendars and book flights and “thrive in a high-pressure setting.” Selling her mother’s house, the long distance move, it gave her another focus.</p>
<p>In Chicago, she used to call her sister’s number just to listen to her voice.</p>
<p>
  <em>Hey, it’s Hana. Leave it at the tone if I know you.</em>
</p>
<p>Sometimes Ada left messages, held the handset to her ear, said, <em>hello</em> and <em>it’s me</em> and <em>are you here</em>, <em>are you still here?</em> Sometimes she just hung up. Most days, she didn’t say anything at all, just listened to the static of her own breath as it left her body.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Tonight, the chamomile tea has done fuckall for her nerves and she has been thinking of alternate worlds for the past hour, unable to sleep. Alternate worlds! She returns to the night at Pyramid Club and sees the doors to the rest of her life open. Like a movie she rewinds and plays again, knowing how it ends, how it will always end. She makes a list:</p>
<p>The scene where she works a late night at Umbrella USA.</p>
<p>The scene where she walks alone in a vast parking lot to her car. 10:28 pm. Last person, beside the cleaning crew, to lock up.</p>
<p>The scene where she is kidnapped by a man, always a man, and when she wakes up, hands and legs bound in rope, he tells her the price for her life is information on her employer. Says he wants to give her a job. Calls it an ongoing relationship.</p>
<p>It won’t matter how this man is part of an anti-biowarfare organization. It won’t matter that his name is Mike or that he is married with two kids. It won’t matter that he will let her live and direct her on missions to collect files from her office, slipping them in a manila envelope once a month for him in various public places: a lake, a mall, a restaurant, a park.</p>
<p>He will tell her his organization’s goal is to eradicate the biowarfare industry once and for all, beginning with Umbrella. Because he is a man, he will look over her body, will determine its use, and he will use it for himself.</p>
<p>In every universe, her body will be her greatest asset. Lucrative, even.</p>
<p>He will offer her cash. Enough to buy a new life. And she will consider the prospect of that new life, the dangerous surge of freedom and power that comes with it, and she will say <em>yes</em>.</p>
<p>In every universe, they will always travel to Raccoon City days before the outbreak, in search of the G virus sample. Always, it will be the last mission Mike ever takes alive. She will make sure of it.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>On the nights she can’t sleep, she imagines her past like a hallway leading to many doors and the doors opening into many small rooms, more hallways. She passes through each one. Inside, the same story.</p>
<p>In every universe, her sister will always die first.</p>
<p>In every universe, Ada will run and run and run and she will never stop running.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>“What the fuck is this life,” she says to the dark.</p>
<p>So she does what she usually does in her fuck-my-life moments, which is pull the covers over her head and masturbate again and again until she is too tired to grieve. She comes quickly thinking of the art instructor who is married and off-limits, and then the art instructor becomes Leon, his mouth between her legs. She thinks of him inside her, how the giving in is more exhilarating than relief.</p>
<p>Afterward, she curls on her side, makes herself small, and cries.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>In bed, she holds Leon’s card up to her bedside lamp’s light. Gold embossed city seal. His full name: Leon Scott Kennedy. Below this, his direct line and cell phone number. It is late in the evening, past eleven, so she dials his cell. He picks up after the second ring.</p>
<p>“Detective Kennedy,” he answers.</p>
<p>“Hi. It’s Ada. Is this a good time to talk?”</p>
<p>There is a beat before he says, “Yeah. Yeah, I’m free.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>1) I think backstories in fanfiction can sometimes feel jarring if they don't line up with our expectations of a character. And I know this one is probably no exception. Despite that, I wrote something that felt true to me re: Ada's family life/early relationships, and how it threads into her present. I've read other people's headcanons for her, but in the end decided to take something I was familiar with (in this case: survivor's guilt, loneliness) and expand on it.</p>
<p>2) Also, I don't like spending too much time in the retrospective. It's important for me to show the lightness/comfort/humor in Ada's life too, all the little things she reaches for when she feels alone. So the rest of the chapters will focus on her and Leon &lt;3.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. second lives</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Everything okay?” Leon asks.</p>
<p>“Define okay,” Ada says.</p>
<p>He says when he finds the answer to that one, she’ll be the first to know. Then he asks what’s on her mind. She thinks about it, opens her window to let the breeze in. She could say <em>Tell me how we ended up like this</em>, even though she knows the why and how and everything in between, or <em>tell me how you ended up here, in New York</em>. Over the phone, he sounds younger, like she is speaking to a version of Leon from the past.</p>
<p>“Work,” he says. “Unless you want the long version.”</p>
<p>“Which is?”</p>
<p>“Blackmail,” he answers, like he is stating a fact of the weather. “Let me back up.”</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>He begins with Claire, a woman he met in Raccoon City. Claire was strong, capable, and kind. Without her, they would have never found a way out. He tells Ada about Sherry too, a little girl who lost her family in the outbreak at twelve years old. Twelve. Without her, Leon is certain he wouldn’t be here, would have chosen death over the nightmares and panic attacks all those years ago. He says the weight of a loaded gun in your hands, the muzzle pressed to your head, it makes you breathe differently. He says his heart was a clutch of live wire. And he couldn’t hold onto it anymore. He couldn’t.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Ada lies on her back, phone cupped to her ear in bed, and she thinks if Leon were beside her, she would hold him close, would say, <em>you’re here now. I’m glad you are</em>. But she doesn’t say anything. She just listens.</p>
<p>“After that,” he says, and there is a hard line of quiet. He says after that, they stayed in his apartment, him and Sherry and Claire, some nowhere Illinois town. Lived there for seven months. He sighs. “We tried to make it work as long as we could.”</p>
<p>“What happened to them?” Ada says.</p>
<p>“Claire left three months in. I mean, we talked about it. We did. She went to Europe to track down her brother. Found him, eventually. She’s there now.”</p>
<p>“So it was just you and the girl.”</p>
<p>“Yeah. Annette’s daughter. You remember Annette.”</p>
<p>And she does. One of Umbrella’s scientists, the last one in that city who knew where the G virus sample was stored, Ada’s target on her last mission. The same woman who had shot her and Leon in the same night.</p>
<p>“I remember,” she says. That gunmetal bridge, holding them up, pistols trained on each other.</p>
<p><em>As much as I wanted to trust you, I didn’t</em>, he’d said. Before the crumble of concrete and steel beneath Ada’s feet. She thinks being a spy was a lot like that. A gape she fell into.</p>
<p>Ada sits up in bed, feels the plush of blanket under her legs. It reminds her of where she is in the present tense. <em>Don’t,</em> she tells herself, <em>don’t go back there.</em></p>
<p>“Hey,” Leon says, and his voice gentles her like a hand through her hair. “Are you still there?”</p>
<p>She swallows. “Yeah. Still here.”</p>
<p>“I’m sorry. None of this is exactly small talk.”</p>
<p>“Don’t apologize,” she says.</p>
<p>“The truth is, you’re the first person I’ve talked to about this. I shouldn’t even be discussing it with anyone. But fuck it.”</p>
<p>“What do you mean you shouldn’t?” Ada hears a shush of movement in the background, like Leon is shifting the weight of his body, maybe sitting up against his headboard like she is right now. She concentrates on his voice as though it can replace her thoughts. It’s why she called him so late, to listen to the reel of someone else’s life so she wouldn’t have to parse through her own, and now here he is, spilling the hush of his secrets to her. Like tag. You’re it.</p>
<p>She feels the weight of her own secrets like stones in her throat.</p>
<p>One day she will need to lay them in the palm of his hand. But she isn’t ready. Not tonight.</p>
<p>She lets him go on.</p>
<p>It happened four months after Claire left for Europe. Two government agents in crisp black suits sitting at Leon’s kitchen table when he came back from work, Sherry in between them, crying. They said, here’s what’s going to happen. They said, we want to give you an opportunity in New York. Do this, or get charged with unlawful custody of a minor. Their way of keeping him useful while under surveillance. They said if Leon accepted, Sherry would be placed in protective custody and he made them guaran-fucking-tee it. And there were questions. They wanted to know everything he knew about the virus, what he had found in Umbrella’s lab the day it collapsed.</p>
<p>The same place Ada had led him into.</p>
<p>It was supposed to be simple. All she had to do was lie and say the virus sample would be taken to the FBI as evidence. She hadn’t expected him to run into Annette and hear the truth from her. Not an agent, just a mercenary rat slinking into the wrong nest.</p>
<p>She tries to sound casual. “What did you tell them?”</p>
<p>“The truth. As far as they know, I never met you or Claire. And don’t take this the wrong way. But I wanted to forget you, for a long time.”</p>
<p>“No, I get it.”</p>
<p> She sets her phone on the pillow next to her because she is tired of holding it. She imagines Leon in a cramped apartment, huddled with Sherry and Claire. She thinks about how she hasn’t been that close to another person, not in years.</p>
<p>She folds her hand under her cheek, lays on her side. “Do you miss them?” she asks.</p>
<p>“Of course,” he says, his voice fading. “Of course I miss them.”</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Before the agents showed up, he remembers the days with Sherry. The day they searched for beauty in the home goods section at TJ Maxx. Sherry had filled his place with animals: whale shaped measuring cups and turtle plush toys and pink curtains spotted with frogs. Every wall in his apartment was painted a different color and Sherry decided she liked the kitchen wall best, yellow as cake. For weeks, she slept with a pillow and blanket in the bathtub, because it made her feel held.</p>
<p>Outside, Leon watched her draw flowers in the shape of tiny hands blooming open. Out of all the pictures she chalked on the driveway, that was the one that got him.</p>
<p>He says he cried a lot in those days. Took odd jobs. Lost sleep. Went to church sometimes and lit votive candles, not knowing who or what to pray for. How else to get through it?</p>
<p>So he chose to live.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>When they hang up, the digital numbers on her alarm clock say 3:48 am. Leon’s last words before he’d ended the call ring over and over, long after the summer night has crept heavy and wet through the window screen, after it sits atop her chest and keeps her awake, and those words are all she has.</p>
<p>
  <em>I have to believe most people are good and kind at the end of it. It’s the only way I know how to keep going. What else is there?</em>
</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>For him, she had no answers. Kindness has never come easy to her, especially in moments she has wanted to be.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>That time she aimed her gun at an infected girl, saw the yellow irises and purple veins and heard the girl’s rasping breath, told the father there was no other choice. Said it like a threat.</p>
<p>Leon had coaxed her to lower the gun. <em>Just let them be.</em></p>
<p>It wasn’t that she wanted to kill the child. She had no plans to pull the trigger. But her job had given her a script and the script demanded her to infiltrate Raccoon City as Ada Wong, a ruthless, uncompromising woman. Out of all her identities, Ada was the character she had grown into like a second, shadow self where all the borders of her real life, her Before life, had vanished.</p>
<p>All her life she wanted to stay sharp. Cleave away things from her body like kindness and softness. Now she longs for these parts like they were bones she lost along the way.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Sometimes Ada Wong stares out at her from bathroom mirrors or the looking glass of greasy train windows. She hasn’t changed. Her shiny black hair is still cut to her chin and blunt at the ends. Her eyes are dark and confrontational. Proof, she supposes, that she was once made of steel.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>In the morning, Ada takes the 7 train to Grand Central for work, a basement studio where she is asked to pose while seated. Blood red fabric drapes over her bare shoulders and for three hours, she goes inside herself. After class, when she is clothed, she walks with the instructor around the room to admire the figures on each canvas. It is her favorite part of the job, finding herself in another person’s hand. Today, there is only one student who has pinned her down using a fine point brush. Her eyelashes, her ring.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>In between poses the next day, she is on her fifteen-minute break when she gets a text from Leon. <em>Hey. Are you free to talk tonight?</em></p>
<p>She sits on a stool, black silk robe cinched at her waist. The art room smells the way it always does, old chalk and turpentine. She taps numbers on her Nokia 3310, and it is agonizing to click-click-click her way from one letter to the next.</p>
<p>
  <em>Hi. Yes.</em>
</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Tonight, Ada allows the scrim of her old, shadow self to peel away, layer by layer, like a photograph in flame. For him, she can risk that much.</p>
<p>“What about you?” he asks. “What brought you to the city?”</p>
<p>She turns one of the stones over in her heart, offers it up. “My sister used to live in Queens. Her name was Hana,” she says and the word is petal-soft, falling around her.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>I don’t like talking about myself</em>, she says.</p>
<p>
  <em>I don’t know why I’m telling you this.</em>
</p>
<p>“It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”</p>
<p>“Let’s stick to post-Raccoon City.” She has had enough of people dying and people coming back from the dead in her lifetime.</p>
<p>She tells him she lived in three cities in four years. Chicago, Osaka, New York.</p>
<p>In Osaka, the city where she felt most at home, she would go to the 80s bar in Doyamacho after dinner, surrounded by love hotels. If she was the only customer, the owner would play David Bowie just for her. “Modern Love” and “Moonage Daydream.” <em>Press your space face close to mine, love</em>, she would sing.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>“Were you happy there?” His voice is crinkled with static.</p>
<p>She liked to think she was happy enough. In Japan, she tried to build a new life as solid as an anchor. She filled her days with castles and aquariums and goth rock bars and temples where she poured water from a chozuya over her hands, stood under giant metal bells and felt them ringing in her chest when she pulled the strings.</p>
<p>But she couldn’t drown out all the other sounds.</p>
<p>“I cried on the plane coming back,” she says. “Like I was saying goodbye to the love of my life.”</p>
<p>“I know the feeling,” he says. “God, I do.”</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>When they hang up, she slides down the wall in her kitchen, traces the linoleum squares with her index finger. She rubs her knees, feels the pressure of the tile under her feet. She wiggles her toes in her cotton socks. Grounding, this is called, but she doesn’t know if she’s doing it right yet. She just stares at the fact of the ground, trusts it is there and won't give out from under her. She is not falling. She is not falling.</p>
<p>She pictures him holding her hand.</p>
<p>Maybe it’s why, when he calls one afternoon from his office and asks to see her again, she says yes.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>It’s there, by 3rd Avenue Station, where she meets him the following week. He is leaning against a graffiti-slashed shutter with one foot on the wall and checking his phone, all of him illuminated by a pink neon sign. BELLA ITALIA, it says above his head. Around them, taxi horns, the scream of brakes, all that oceanic human noise of the city.</p>
<p>When he notices her, he puts his phone away and pushes off the wall. His eyes are such a pale blue, they look translucent.</p>
<p>“Ready?” he says.</p>
<p>She steps forward into the spill of neon light with him. “Lead the way.”</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Sapporo East on 2<sup>nd</sup> Avenue, late summer Friday night. From the speakers Meiko Kaji sings “Yadokari,” of lost love and sunlight on snow as they sit in a red booth, under the gold glow of square lanterns. Dinner is ebi gyoza and unadon for her, nabeyaki udon for him. The eel is honey-sweet and melts on her tongue.</p>
<p>They raise glasses of nigorizake. “To second lives,” Ada jokes, but he repeats after her, chinks the lip of his glass to hers.</p>
<p>“You look great, by the way,” Leon says when she isn’t looking. She gets distracted by the framed photos of Japan on the wall, of tea fields and uphill roads, kids on bicycles.</p>
<p>Across from her, he sets down the bottle of sake, cloudy and blue, into its bucket of ice.</p>
<p>“I mean it,” he says. “It’s good to see you like this. You know. While the world’s not ending.”</p>
<p>She smiles. “Are you always this saccharine?”</p>
<p>“Usually, yeah.”</p>
<p>“Don’t change,” she says and she means it.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>After her third glass of nigori, she is feeling too brave, unable to help herself. It is her turn to be sentimental. “So you’ve been in the city a while. Have you ever imagined your life with a stranger here? I mean, like on a train. In the elevator.”</p>
<p>“Are you asking me if I’ve ever been that lonely?”</p>
<p>“Have you?”</p>
<p>“Yes,” he says, without hesitating. Then he laughs.</p>
<p>After paying the bill, he tilts his head toward the door.</p>
<p>She gets up from the table and catches him glance at her thighs for a second. She likes it, the way he’s looking at her now. As if they were not survivors of the Midwest apocalypse four years ago, as if they were anyone else sharing a booth in an East Village restaurant.</p>
<p>She picked a red mini dress for the occasion, the scent of black orchids on her collarbone. In red, she feels most like herself. Warm and sexy and capable. Safe.</p>
<p>Leon motions to her heels, shiny and black. “Unless you want to cab it,” he says.</p>
<p>“I survived one of the worst nights of my life in stilettos. Don’t start.”</p>
<p>He puts his hands up. “Of course.”</p>
<p>He opens the door for her and already the night air is damp on her skin. As the waiters thank them for coming, Meiko Kaji begins “Fune Ni Yurarete,” but they leave before Ada can catch all the words.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>
  <em>While the boat sways us both lazily atop the waves…</em>
</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Kaji played the outlaw in her movies. As a kid, Ada stole bootleg VHS tapes from the video store and for a whole week she would become Lady Snowblood. She would dress in butterfly prints and pretend a fallen branch was her sword and she would slice the air with it. The logic was, if she could turn into steel, then nothing would hurt her.</p>
<p>In the theater, they are watching Blood Simple and halfway through, when the husband is buried alive, Ada hears a groan. She turns around, braced and ready. She is relieved to find not a zombie, but a young couple with a jacket thrown over their laps. She is pretty sure the girl is getting fingerbanged under it. The guy makes eye contact and Ada turns back to the screen, her skin prickling.</p>
<p>The movie is two-lane highways in the pitch of night. It is Texas desert vengeance played to a Motown tune. <em>Sentimental fool, am I</em>. By the end, the only person left alive is a woman. Her dumb luck.</p>
<p>“Everyone is so hapless,” Ada says to Leon, after they walk out of the theater. “It all could have been avoided if they learned how to speak to each other.”</p>
<p>“True,” Leon says. “But maybe it was doomed from the start, no matter what they did.”</p>
<p>“So you’re an optimist now.”</p>
<p>“Same as you.” He smirks and she has half a mind to tell him, <em>For fuck’s sake come home with me. Tell me how we ended up here and tell me how it ends.</em></p>
<p>*</p>
<p>On their way to the subway station, they pass a dirty mattress propped on the curb and Leon has to say her name twice before she realizes he is speaking to her. On the third time, she freezes up. She can’t stop thinking about desert highways from the movie. All that freedom.</p>
<p>They stand under a striped awning of a flower shop and crowds of people pass them by on 12<sup>th</sup> street, smelling of fried food and cigarettes.</p>
<p>“Hey. If any of this feels strange,” Leon says, “we don’t have to hang out. I want you to know that.”</p>
<p>“Why would it be strange?” she asks, but she knows what he means is this: because the last time we spent a night together, shit went down in the worst unimaginable way. Because the last time I saw you, we were shot. We were hunted. We almost died.</p>
<p>He raises an eyebrow at her like, <em>Do I have to spell it out?</em></p>
<p>“It’s fine. I’m fine,” she says. “We’re here now. I’m… willing to try this if you are.”</p>
<p>He searches her face—<em>are-we-safe-are-we-safe-here?</em>—and it is so familiar, it hurts. Then he smiles a little. “Okay,” he says finally, and his eyes are so kind and she is not falling and she remembers how to breathe.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>
  <em> Yes yes yes of course we are safe.</em>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Took a little longer with this one due to revision after revision. It was nice to just write a (mostly) light-hearted chapter, considering the state of the world @__@</p>
<p>&amp; I had to turn on moderated comments bc of harrassment/threats I've received from random anons. Everyone else has been so lovely and supportive here, but apparently writing an Aeon fic is the easiest way to piss off incels in this fandom. It just motivated me to keep writing though!</p>
<p>I made a playlist for Leon and you can listen to it <a href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6VLYdU96nlP7lLRdkfUzXR?si=G5MW7qCXSQGf6dH2QJgEyg">here on Spotify</a>. :D Thank you for reading as always and I hope you enjoy this chapter!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chiaroscuro</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>In her room, she clips her nails and paints them ruby. Sometimes her hands shake before she applies the second coat. She watches red polish drip from the wand and bloom like wings on her bedspread patterned with cranes, watches blooded spots dry and turn maroon, and thinks <em>evidence</em>, thinks <em>proof this is real</em>. She flutters her hands. Counts minutes. Drags her breath along the tips of her nails. When they are ready and gleaming, she spreads her legs and thinks of the boy with straw-gold hair baring his heart underneath her.</p>
<p>When was the last time she brought anyone home? Six months? Eight? Long enough to stop counting.</p>
<p>It’s always the same fantasy that gets her, in the end. Naked, on his knees, getting himself off. She feels there is nothing more honest than having someone witness you in a private moment of pleasure. She is done in three minutes, according to the bedside alarm clock, so she coaxes herself to that point again. And again. Her abs are sore from all the contractions.</p>
<p>Last night, he walked her to the station and they went home on two different trains, not a word about when they would see each other again exchanged between them. They hadn’t touched.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>In Japan, she had been strict, had a rule system, made sure her past lovers were never more than vague imprints on her bed, creases she smoothed flat in the mornings, cigarette butts ashed in tumblers she emptied into the trash and scrubbed clean of their scent. Skin hunger was one thing. It had a solution. It made coping easy. But love? She did not care for it. Back then, when she believed movement could stall grief from swallowing her up, she only wanted touch. The deep pressure of hands on her body, the sensation of being fucked until she was obliterated. Afterwards, being held. She looked for that feeling everywhere.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Some days she found it on top of desks. Rumpled futons. Splayed on tatami floors with someone’s mother sleeping in the adjacent room. In love hotels where she could choose any room she wanted, depending on her mood that day. If she was feeling sappy, she picked the ones designed to look like aquariums. Inside, the bioluminescent blacklight made her feel so small. Or she picked the rooms full of beige carpeting, bare walls if she was in a hurry. Condom dispensers on the nightstand. She remembers all the blue wrappers had yellow smiley faces on them. MAKE LOVE! they said on the front.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>When she said goodbye to Leon in the subway, what she wanted most was to be held. Pride gnawed at her heart. She stepped into the train, moved close to the window and raised her open palm and he raised his. As if to say, I see you. As if to say, and I am letting you go.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>She remembers the seconds before the fall, when the only thing keeping her bound to this earth was his hand wrapped tight around her wrist. She looked up into his face. Saw that shut-up-I’ve-got-you hope in his eyes, strained and pleading.</p>
<p>24 years old and she had made her choices, all of them having led her to this city, this bridge, this boy, gunshot wound streaming down her arm with her legs hanging useless over the deep pit of space. By then, the gap between the person she was and who she wanted to be had grown as vast as an ocean and she didn’t know how to cross over to that other side.</p>
<p>True, she had been coerced into this life but when presented with opportunities to escape, she chose to stay, believing she could climb the ranks and earn a larger cut with each assignment. The power to begin as someone else was a dangerous kind of freedom, a privilege, and that’s why she wanted it.</p>
<p>Over the bridge, she saw where all this had brought her.</p>
<p>She could hear the lab cracking open and from somewhere much deeper she cracked too. She could smell the ash. She told Leon to forget it but he would not. <em>It’s not worth it,</em> she had said. Out of all the bullshit and lies, there it was, cast out like a rope into the darkness. She would die honest at least.</p>
<p>But she would not take Leon down with her. Not when he was still young enough to believe in justice, in the goodness of the human soul, and so on. The kind of person who wanted to be so good it would envelop the people he loved like a shield, protect them from all violence and disaster, all sadness and hurt.</p>
<p>All the men who had failed her didn’t believe in any of those things.</p>
<p>If there was anything worth him holding onto, it was that. Not her.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Take care of yourself, Leon</em>, she had said, before the world spun to dark water.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>When she jolts awake to check her pulse, the clock reads 11:35 am and she is already late for work. “Fuck me,” she says, shaking off the nightmare, before getting dressed and slinging her bag over her shoulder.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>For today’s lesson, the art instructor has passed a book on Egon Schiele from student to student, as an example of blind contour, the act of drawing the borders of a subject, stick of charcoal against paper, in one continuous line.</p>
<p>The eye must be solely trained on the subject for this exercise. It is important, Dave says, that when presented with a body, you are no longer seeing it as a body, but shape and shifting planes of light and shadow. Now, eyes up.</p>
<p>They begin.</p>
<p>Today, Dave has brought a little boombox and a tape of orchestral jazz. The room fills with Cab Calloway’s high, beautiful voice. There are trumpets, the plink of piano keys, the rustle of newsprint, a sound like worshippers turning pages in a bible all at once.</p>
<p>On a low stage, Ada lies down on white sheets and focuses on the squares of fluorescent light above, the specks of dead flies caught inside the panel, and she thinks about the landscape of her body, the borders of her life smudged around like wet paint.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>After class, she and Dave are in the hallway looking at assignments pinned to the wall: monochrome studies of night skies and planets, the puckered surface of moons in various states of eclipse.</p>
<p>“Are these from a different class?” she asks him. Dave nods and adjusts his glasses. He is a quiet, middle-aged man, always in plaid shirts and distressed jeans, cascade of brown hair over his shoulders. Those first days on the job, she used to imagine the classroom empty except for him.</p>
<p>“My wife’s students,” he says. “They’re learning gradation these days. I don’t know if I told you before, she comes in on the weekends.”</p>
<p>At the mention of his wife, Ada takes a step farther toward the last drawing: a smoky image of Saturn.</p>
<p>Her sister had explained the technique to her once, chiaroscuro, the contrast of light and shade to create the illusion of a third dimension, of volume on a flat surface. She would point to examples in her textbooks, the painting by Goya of Saturn Devouring His Son. <em>See?</em> she would say, pointing to the monster’s shadowed thighs. Ada thought it was a terrible image, a giant biting into the head of a human, eyes wild and bulging.</p>
<p><em>I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking at</em>, Ada would tell her sister and Hana would sigh and close the book, change the subject to easier things: movies, music, lovers, work.</p>
<p>At home, she keeps a stack of art history and drawing lesson books on the floor near her bed. This paltry attempt of learning her sister’s language, too late to be of any real use except for class. Who else does she have to speak it with?</p>
<p>She asks Dave when the last class of the summer will be, and he tells her the first Thursday of September. He offers to talk to some friends, see if he can help her find another place if she would like.</p>
<p>His kindness disarms her and for an instant she is reminded of Leon.</p>
<p>“Thank you,” she says, and they nod goodbye, Dave returning to his classroom, hands clasped behind his back.</p>
<p>If she was a different kind of person, the self she was in Japan, she would have followed him inside. Instead, she emerges from the basement studio out onto the streets, the day airless and hot, and on the 7 train to 61<sup>st</sup>, she texts Leon to see what his schedule looks like on the weekend. She hopes he is off Saturday, the only day she is completely free of modeling and dog-walking in Manhattan.</p>
<p>His reply comes when she is on the Q18 bus: his weekends are free.</p>
<p>While they come up with plans, she makes a mental note to search the art books for lessons on chiaroscuro later. Not that Ada was an artist herself. She can barely sketch without the result looking like a child’s scrawl. But she finds comfort in the accumulation of facts and artist biographies, part of a language she hopes to share with another person one day. Whenever Hana talked about a third dimension, Ada liked to imagine a world underneath her lived reality, a place you could vanish into, like someone else’s dream.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>
  <strong>Pyramid Club, August</strong>
</p>
<p>At the bar, a woman with a blue pixie cut shuffles tarot cards for a living. Her first customers are a young blonde couple in matching bowl cuts. While the tarot reader flips over cards and recites her stupid lines, Ada overhears the words <em>tower</em> and<em> great change</em> and <em>cataclysmic</em>. The couple’s eyes are round and wet as if they have just been told how they are going to die.</p>
<p>“Poor kids,” Ada says, and downs her vodka soda.</p>
<p>For an hour, she watches the goth kids glide and sway across the floor in their lace dresses, all the dancers sheathed in red smoke. The spinning blades of light from the disco ball on the ceiling make their bodies look cut open and strange. She wishes one of the drawing students were here to capture this moment. The fragments of people with their arms up to heaven, as if to catch it.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>The tarot reader approaches Ada with her deck of cards, says the first reading is free, and wouldn’t she like to know what the universe has in store for her love life?</p>
<p>Ada blots her cheeks with a napkin and closes her tab. “No thanks,” she says to the woman, and steps off the stool to join the swarm of dancing bodies.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>On the train, her phone buzzes. She flips it open to find a text from Leon.</p>
<p><em>I was thinking about you</em>, he says.</p>
<p>It is almost midnight. Then she remembers he is probably working late. Or horny. Or both.</p>
<p><em>Makes two of us</em>, she types back.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>
  <strong>Riverside Park</strong>
</p>
<p>A last-minute work call shifts their plans around so she meets him at the dog run on Sunday. An excited black and white Shiba Inu trots at Leon’s heels. Her name is Mira. Ada pets her between the ears.</p>
<p>“Huh,” Leon says, “she usually doesn’t do that with new people.”</p>
<p>“Doesn’t do what?”</p>
<p>“Let you pet her.”</p>
<p>“I’m a woman of many talents,” she says, which makes him nod and say <em>apparently</em>. Together they follow the curve of a leaf-strewn path, the treetops above them tinged with gold.</p>
<p>Ada’s first walk of the day is a Labrador named Barkley. His owner is an IT manager and indie-folk musician, the most generous of her clients. Under the shade of a tall maple, she watches Barkley spin in circles on the grass, trying to eat his tail.</p>
<p>It is the highlight of her morning.</p>
<p>The rest of the day’s dogs will be restless and wild, will bark at pigeons and tug on their leashes and by the end of it, Ada will pour herself a double gin and tonic at home, stretch her limbs, practice lunges, and go to bed.</p>
<p>Today, she and Leon stand side by side, watching their dogs play. Cicadas fill the park with their buzzing.</p>
<p>Ada learns Mira is a PTSD service dog. Leon adopted her three years ago, when he moved here.</p>
<p>“We take care of each other,” he says and drops down on one knee to scratch under Mira’s chin. “Don’t we, Mira?”</p>
<p><em>We take care of each other</em>. For Ada, love is impossible to define in a sentence, but she thinks that one comes pretty close.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>
  <strong>Village Yokocho</strong>
</p>
<p>On the ceiling, the blue and white striped paper lanterns strung from one end of the bar to the other make Ada think of mini beach balls. A faint glow pulses inside them and the walls are papered with calligraphy. The smells of skewered meat, grilled and fatty, make her swoon.</p>
<p>Sitting at the bar, both of them on red stools, and she can already tell how this night will end. Leon seeing her off on a subway platform as the train doors slide shut between them. They don’t kiss or hug, but she notices the moments they do make contact. His forearm against hers. Knees touching under the bar. Or the time she comes out of the bathroom, trying to affix the clasp on her bracelet.</p>
<p>“This damn thing,” she says.</p>
<p>He reaches for her. “Here, let me do it.”</p>
<p>For him, she exposes the inside of her wrist. His fingers graze her skin and it is electric.</p>
<p>He works on her bracelet. Strands of hair fall in his eyes and she fights the urge to brush them away. “There,” he says.</p>
<p>They look at each other, her wrist in his hands. She feels his thumb tracing a slow line up to her palm.</p>
<p>“So… can I have my arm back?” she says.</p>
<p>He lets go, and her right hand stays in the air between them.</p>
<p>“Thanks,” she says and catches a hint of his smile.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>I think a part of me will always love you</em>, a sentence in her mother’s handwriting, addressed to a man, she assumed, who was not her father. Pages in blue ink. As a kid, Ada had found them folded up in a bin of VHS tapes, early Wong Kar-wai films and 70s porn movies under her mother’s bed. More letters, faded polaroids. All these things her mother never thought to share with anyone. Years later, and Ada thinks she knows why.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>The weight of everything we have known and lost. Where to put all of it?</p>
<p>Ada believed in traveling light. Best to sever ties than hold onto the memory of a love that can never be yours.</p>
<p>She repeated this in her head whenever a man wanted to make her his girl. Said it like it was something wise.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Another way of seeing it:</p>
<p>What was so hard about loving and enduring another person, the world seemed to ask?</p>
<p>And she would have said, <em>What could be harder?</em></p>
<p>*</p>
<p>
  <strong>Monte’s Trattoria, September</strong>
</p>
<p>She slides on the mask, easy as breath. No one can see it, but she knows it is there. She is used to this, manufacturing intimacy with a man like a glass wall that says to him, I will be what you want but I will not let you through. And usually, nothing does.</p>
<p>She talks to him about her favorite clubs: Madame X, The Element, Don Hill’s, Mercury Lounge. Pyramid Club, open four nights a week, 8pm to 4am.</p>
<p>“You go every night?” he asks.</p>
<p>She stirs the ice around in her drink with a straw, shrugs. “Once, twice a week.”</p>
<p>“What’s it like?”</p>
<p>“Drugs,” she says like it’s a dare, “lots of drugs, Leon. You want to see for yourself?”</p>
<p>“Besides that. What’s it like for you?”</p>
<p>She sucks on her lime wedge and thinks about it. Stares hard at the peek of skin under his collar, the silver glint of his watch. “Like leaving my body,” she says.</p>
<p>“Oh. That good, huh?”</p>
<p>She laughs.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>
  <strong>Pyramid Club, 80s Night</strong>
</p>
<p>On her good days, leaving her body means living outside of time. As the bouncer stamps her wrist, her nerves are hot and pulsing.</p>
<p>In the basement, there are dancers in gas masks, torn mesh tops and silver chains crossed over their chests. To Ada, it feels like reuniting with old friends, though she returns to this club as a stranger each time, and emerges, eyes sparkling, into the streets always as herself, sharp as a fang, buzzing with heat and lust.</p>
<p>When James Kerr sings <em>what are you gonna do when the flames go up?</em> it makes her feel possessed. She picks a spot in front of the stage, where the girls are dizzying in their beauty. Purple fog gushes from the DJ’s table. Her cells spark. In this world, she has no use for language. In this world, the dead come back in the form of bad 80s pop songs and there is no such thing as grief. There is only her body, hands joined with another woman who could be her sister, the vibration in her throat when she screams and screams.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>
  <strong>Central Park</strong>
</p>
<p><em>I want to show you something</em>, he says, and the boyish lilt to his voice makes her feel like an explorer, the two of them on the verge of finding delicate, lost things. On the way there, she tracks a plane cutting through the sky, that gorgeous time of day when the clouds are striped in pink and blue.</p>
<p>Poised on a hulk of rock is a bronze statue of a dog.</p>
<p>She is flushed, giddy from the gin they shared earlier. “Who’s this?” she asks.</p>
<p>He smiles. “You’re blushing.”</p>
<p>“Sure you don’t want to take a picture?”</p>
<p>“I wish,” he says.</p>
<p>She cocks her hip against the dog’s side, biting her lip. She notices the small moles on Leon’s cheek. The prickle of hair along his chin from where he shaved. She could pull him by the collar if she wanted.</p>
<p>“Why’d you bring me here?”</p>
<p> “I wanted to tell you a story about this place,” he says, then looks at her mouth. “But I’m losing the words.”</p>
<p>“Try,” she says. “For me.”</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>
  <strong>Nome, Alaska</strong>
</p>
<p>This was in 1925. Nome was a scattering of tiny houses on snowy fields.</p>
<p>That year the town was struck with a diphtheria outbreak. There was one hospital. One doctor pleading for help in telegrams to Anchorage, through radio signals, a lone voice washed in static. The last of the antitoxin was expired, ineffective. A quarantine was placed.</p>
<p>The children were dying.</p>
<p>With the port iced over, and the storm barring air travel, and the nearest train station over 600 miles away, a route that took mail couriers a month to cross, in Nenana, what is left?</p>
<p>Imagine packs of sled dogs, Siberian huskies and their mushers. How they carry ampules wrapped in fur in a continuous hand-off, meeting their relays at roadhouses in the dark. How they run, how they run, how they run through razored ice floes. Blizzards, arctic silence.</p>
<p>Imagine frostbite on your hands, and the spindrifts so thick you can’t see your body or the tundra or your dogs anymore. Horizontal lashings of snow singe your face. Your skin, so cold it <em>sears</em>. You lead the final leg of this trip, the last 50 miles to Nome. <em>If I die here</em>, you think, losing all track of time. <em>If I die</em>.</p>
<p>The children are dying by the hour.</p>
<p>So you go on, plunge north, even after the wind knocks over your sled as if flicked from the fingers of a lesser god, sends you and the dogs tumbling and the serum gets lost in the snow. You untangle the dog harnesses. Eyes shut to the blizzard, you remove your gloves and grope and dig and shovel, tears scraping to ice on your cheeks.</p>
<p>You find the serum. Place it on the sled, grip the crossbar, start again.</p>
<p>You tell yourself: keep going.</p>
<p>Four dogs die from exposure before you make it to Nome, ice and blood crusting your face. Chest heaving, your last words before passing out: “Damn fine dog.”</p>
<p>You wake to the villagers cheering, the epidemic is over, it’s finally over. <em>Good job me</em>, you think sardonically as you lie in bed and try to wiggle your reddened fingers out of numbness. What you don’t know yet: that some nerves are beyond repair. That you will never get the feeling in your hands back, not fully. And you will always wake with a dull roar in your ears.</p>
<p>But you are still alive.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>On the plaque, a relief is engraved of a musher and his dogs, one husky in the lead pulling them forward into a blizzard. At the bottom of the plaque, three words: Endurance. Fidelity. Intelligence.</p>
<p>“A link in the chain.” Leon pats the dog’s burnished ears.</p>
<p><em>Fidelity</em>. Something twists in Ada’s chest, reading this.</p>
<p>She studies Leon’s profile in the amber halo of a streetlamp. She reads the plaque until her vision blurs. In life, she knows there is no such thing as redemption for the wicked. There are no easy morals, this age-old American ideal she has never identified with. In her past lives she was a criminal. A liar. A reckless woman looking down over the cliff to see what was there. Sometimes, she liked it.</p>
<p>They could not be more different, she realizes, Leon and herself. But what would it look like if she tried, if she told the truth for once?</p>
<p>She touches the dog’s bronzed paw, worn to golden from so many other hands. It is damp and cool.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Tell it again, she wants to say. Tell me one good thing. This moment, and the next.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>In the hushed gloom of Central Park, he places a hand on the small of her back and she turns to him, satin of her dress brushing against his shirt, heart beating wildly. Who is this person beside her, so resolute and sure? Where had he come from?</p>
<p>She asks if he lives alone.</p>
<p>“Technically, no,” he says.</p>
<p>“Leon. Christ. I don’t mean your dog.”</p>
<p>He laughs, “I’m not seeing anyone else, no,” then tilts his head slightly, as if he’s beginning to understand what she’s really asking of him.</p>
<p>She follows the contour of his lapel with her fingers, feels the crisp edges leading down to the first button. His skin is so warm through the cloth.</p>
<p>He takes her hand. “Are you sure that’s what you want?”</p>
<p>“I don’t know. But I want to do something.”</p>
<p>“Hey. You know you can talk to me, right?”</p>
<p>She pulls away from him. “What are we doing here, Leon.”</p>
<p>“What do you mean?”</p>
<p>“This.” She gestures vaguely at the space between them. “Us. We can’t keep pretending nothing happened.”</p>
<p>“Is that what you think we’re doing?”</p>
<p>She turns around, spots a row of green benches nearby. She doesn’t want to have an argument right now. “Sit down with me?” she says.</p>
<p>From this angle on the bench, the dog shines on his little cliff to their right and Ada can see the dusk-colored sky, light peeking through the trees and all the skinny, spidering branches.</p>
<p>She folds her arms across her waist. “I keep thinking about the cable car. Do you remember that?”</p>
<p>He says, “I do.”</p>
<p>“Sometimes I’m there again. And I can call back every detail. I feel it now, when I’m with you.”</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>
  <strong>Raccoon City, 1998</strong>
</p>
<p>That September, she rode a cable car for the first time, this metal gleaming structure like a submarine with two yellow headlights staring out like eyes. The destination: NEST, Umbrella’s underground lab. Inside, she and Leon were the only passengers.</p>
<p>Through the window above the control panel, Ada could see their passage through gray tunnels and it felt like she was being dropped down into a giant mouth, ringed with light. She sat on a steel bench. She touched the spot on her thigh where blood had seeped through the gauze. Her pantyhose was torn. Her dress was caked with mud. They both smelled like shit.</p>
<p>She had told him her mission: retrieve the G virus sample as proof of Umbrella’s crimes, their illegal bioweapon experiments, and she would bring it to the FBI. It should have been that simple.</p>
<p>The truth was, she had no interest in saving America. This country and its system built on violence had failed her sister who was now dead, her immigrant parents who were dead, and had tried to kill her too. Long before she became a spy, Ada was well-versed in surviving the horrors of the world as a woman. She knew the worst things in life were the hands seeking her out saying <em>this is mine</em> and <em>mine</em>. She didn’t need the zombies to show her that.</p>
<p>Yet she couldn’t forget that the system had raised her too. That’s why she was doing this for the benefit of a different organization. Cash, rubber-banded in duffel bags, heavy as cinder blocks. That reward would have been enough to buy a new life. Escape everything. If Leon had known, she knew he would have never come this far.</p>
<p>The truth was, she hadn’t expected him to find out. She hadn’t expected to depend on him so much. When they met, she saw a boy not much older than her sister had been before she died, and all the weight of another person’s needs she no longer had space to carry. It didn’t matter how many times she told him to fuck off, <em>stop asking questions and get the hell out of here</em>—he refused. Instead of saving his own ass, he would leap into gunfire to push her out of the way, taking the bullet himself. He would clean and bandage her leg in the sewers and help her stand and walk.</p>
<p>He would smile and say, <em>You protected me. Now it’s my turn.</em></p>
<p>He would say, <em>I’m not just going to leave you</em>.</p>
<p>And he didn’t.</p>
<p>It was enough to make Ada question every foul choice she had made in her life.</p>
<p>In the cable car, she wiped grime off her arms, sick and dizzy with relief, couldn’t remember the script she had prepared for this moment. She looked into Leon’s face, his hair streaked with dirt and dried blood in the corner of his mouth.</p>
<p>She touched his bandaged shoulder. She wanted to yell at him: <em>what are you doing? The world is your enemy. It will crack open your heart. </em></p>
<p>Instead, she said she needed his help. She couldn’t do this herself, not with her injuries. If he could search the lab, find the sample and bring it to her, justice would be served.</p>
<p>He shook his head, <em>I’m not just gonna leave you here alone, what if something happens to you, what if you’re attacked?</em></p>
<p>After she kissed him, he didn't speak, but she could see him hold fast to every word like it was an admission of love. Or did she imagine this? In her head, she made a game out of it, two lies and a truth, and said:</p>
<p>
  <em>I have plenty to live for.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>I want to see you again.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>I’ll be fine.</em>
</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>When he left, Ada listened to the tap of her heels echo and wished for impossible things in the silence. She wished for her mother. She wished for a reset button to her life. She wished for a home to return to, promised herself if she survived the night, she would move to a place with mountains where Leon would never find her, she would change her name, would say goodbye to Ada Wong, would find a more solid kind of happiness.</p>
<p>She would live, when everyone else in her life had not.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>
  <strong>Central Park, 2002</strong>
</p>
<p>She tells him all this, palms flat on her lap, and says, “Most of that year, before Raccoon City. I spent it not caring if I lived or died. And I wasn’t looking for anyone to understand. There was power in that.”</p>
<p>The best way she can put it is this: tracing the four walls of your body and finding an empty room where there should be a person. The mystery of not knowing why you do what you do. That singular loneliness.</p>
<p>She tells him about how she used to call her sister in the months after her death, how she would talk and talk into the empty dial tone and sometimes her sister would answer.</p>
<p>Ada smooths the creases on her dress, feeling embarrassed. Gently, Leon puts his hand on hers, strokes the back of her wrist with his thumb, a small consolation. “What did she say?”</p>
<p>“She said she was alive, but in a different world. Another layer to this one. She used to talk about art being a lot like that. Maybe that doesn’t make sense.”</p>
<p>Leon’s voice is steady. “No. It does. Makes more sense than anything I’ve been taught.”</p>
<p>“And what’s that?”</p>
<p>He shrugs. “Bright lights. Angry gods. The meaning of life and getting judged for your sins. That kind of… bullshit.”</p>
<p>“So you were a Catholic?”</p>
<p>“Was, yeah.”</p>
<p>They don’t say anything more for a while, so she watches his long fingers settle in the spaces between her own, the clean, square cut of his nails. It is so new, this tenderness. A part of her wants to turn away, but she doesn’t. She tells herself to notice every second. His profile washed in the blue evening light. The sweetness of cloves in the air. She lets herself imagine more days with him. Building a life perhaps. Getting through one day. And then another.</p>
<p>What else is a life but a series of leavings? Yet she wonders, now, about beginnings too, where they could lead her.</p>
<p>She tells him about her theory of alternate worlds, says, “Maybe there’s a life when we met somewhere else. Somewhere normal. You and me.”</p>
<p>“There could be.” He squeezes her hand. “Now, for example.”</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>A hot wind blows through the park. With the setting sun, the undersides of the treetops have turned a deep blue.</p>
<p>Leon rests his elbows on his knees, head bowed. “Can I be honest with you?” he says.</p>
<p>“Just tell me. You don’t have to ask.”</p>
<p>“I looked for you, after I moved here. Anyone wearing a red dress. Anyone with your haircut even.”</p>
<p>This makes them laugh.</p>
<p>“That’s not obsessive at all,” she says.</p>
<p>“I’m serious.”</p>
<p>“And? What did you find? Anything good?” She leans into him, tries to sound like her old shadow self. Coy, mysterious. It almost works.  </p>
<p>“Nothing good,” he says. “So many women, you know. But none that were you.”</p>
<p>For a few minutes, she listens to the shush of the darkening leaves in the wind, the distant noises of traffic. Every now and then a lone jogger passes underneath Willowdell Arch, the smack of their feet on pavement and Ada watches their expressions, tense and focused, as they continue down the trail. She can’t help but envy their sense of purpose, their ease of moving through this world without the urge to look back.</p>
<p>She touches two fingers to her cheek and feels the mask heavy as slate, hair-thin cracks where she used to be impenetrable.</p>
<p>“I don’t understand,” she says finally, “You could turn me in. After everything I’ve just told you. I’ve made it easy for you.”</p>
<p>Leon reaches up to caress the side of her face, pushing strands of hair back from her eyes. She looks at him.</p>
<p>“And lose you again? No.”</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Later, in his apartment, she will tell him she doesn’t want anything to happen, and nothing does.</p>
<p>She will throb all over with wanting to touch him. She won’t. She will fall asleep next to him wearing one of his band t-shirts and she will dream.</p>
<p>She will dream of a gray and white husky large as a school bus, its fur lush and long as a cloak, galloping on tree-thick legs through a wheat field in slow motion. She will see a little boy hidden under the dog’s fur, curled asleep and safe on its back, and they will race downhill as if toward salvation, and she will feel the warmth of wind and sunshine on her skin and then the sensation of flying, of being lifted up.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>For now, they stand together in a shadowed corner of the park with moths in rings above their heads, and he holds her face in his hands, tips her chin up.</p>
<p><em>You're alive</em>, he seems to be saying. <em>Don't you know you're alive?</em> And his irises are so clear. They are so bright.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>;-; I know it's been a while since the last time. I'm sorry for the wait! I've been taking fiction classes here and there and went through many revisions with this chapter until I was happy with it. Already working on the next one where things get... heated @_@.</p>
<p>I really hope you enjoy it &amp; please do feel free to let me know what you thought! </p>
<p>I'm so happy to be part of this fandom. I can't say that enough. ♥</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. exit wound</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>CW: some sexually explicit scenes. If you want to skip those, I've marked them in a section break with four asterisks instead of one. It's toward the end.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>"Now, I demand a love that is stupid and beautiful, like a pilot turning off her engines mid-flight to listen for rain on wings."</p><p>- Paige Lewis, <strong>Pavlov Was the Son of a Priest</strong></p>
<hr/><p>They sat together in the backseat of a cab, and the driver played Cantonese pop on the radio. 夢中人. Rain snaked down the windows as Faye Wong sang <em>man in my dreams, I want you to be real</em>.</p><p>The city lights winked and flashed, smudged by the rain. His apartment was closer than Queens, so that’s where she was going.</p><p> </p><p>She slipped off her heels by the door, bending down to greet his dog who had seemed to be waiting for him to come home, her little black nose peeking through the door as soon as it opened. As Leon made his way through the kitchen, turning on every light, Mira followed him, her nails tick-tick-ticking on the hardwood floor.</p><p>Water had darkened the florals on Ada’s dress. Most of his shirt had soaked through and she could see the ridges of muscle in his shoulders, his upper back.</p><p>“Leave them off,” she said.</p><p>He turned around.</p><p>“The lights. Please.”</p><p> </p><p>In the living room, she touched the floor length windows, fingertip to fingertip with her reflection. She wondered what Leon felt when he was up here at night, looking over the city, so small from this height that he could fold his hands over it. She marveled at the view.</p><p>His footsteps sounded behind her. “Hey,” he said. The moonlight paled him, carved slant shadows down his cheekbones.</p><p>He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and she told herself to remember this moment, as if she was already looking back from a place where all this—his heat, his body—was gone.</p><p>“What is it?”</p><p>“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just been a day, that’s all.”</p><p>“We don’t have to do anything,” he said.</p><p>Ada looked past him to the TV hanging on the wall. On screen, their reflections blurred together. She couldn’t make out her own face. “We could watch something,” she said, wanting a distraction from the old images, the ones they had been talking about in Central Park: Raccoon City, the cable car, her sister’s ghost speaking to her over the white noise of a phone. She inspected Leon’s video shelf, looking for something familiar.</p><p>Chungking Express. It was perfect. She picked it up, said, <em>let's watch this</em>, for no other reason than she and her sister had seen it together once.</p><p>He smiled. "I didn't know you liked love stories."</p><p>"It's about more than that," she said, then stopped herself from going on about the film's thesis--impermanence, borrowed lives, obsession. She was tired of speaking. "It's so much more than that."</p><p>"I know," he said, turning on the TV. "I just mean, I like learning about you."</p><p>"Don't get soppy on me" she said, more to herself than him. </p><p> </p><p>That scene where Cop 223 hits on the beautiful drug dealer in four languages, Cantonese, Japanese, English and Mandarin, using the same stupid pick-up line: <em>do you like pineapple? </em></p><p><em>You’ll never get to know me</em>, the drug dealer said, smoking her cigarette. She was wearing a blonde wig and sunglasses that covered most of her face.</p><p>It was the point in the film where she and Leon both laughed at the same time. Ada clung to the sound, the rise and fall of it.</p><p> </p><p>She couldn't resist this image—Tony Leung gliding a toy airplane around his apartment. Ada loved this part. She listened to the whoosh of engine noises rolling from Tony’s mouth. She knew the lyrics before Dinah Washington sang them on the radio, <em>my lonely nights are through, dear, since you said you were mine. </em>The police officer and the flight attendant, destined to change course.</p><p>As the music played, Ada felt herself slipping into a place outside time, years away from herself, into this scene playing on the screen in front of her. Suddenly she was the flight attendant, listening to airline safety announcements. She practiced putting on her imaginary life jacket, blowing into each tube. <em>Masks drop automatically</em>, the PA system announced, and she reached for that too.</p><p>In bed, Tony made the plane hover low, his lover’s back bright with sweat and Ada felt the slow beauty of the moment. The flight attendant smiled into the pillow, little plane perched on her shoulder. She knew landings were the hardest part.</p><p>*</p><p>Before the end, she glanced over at Leon on the couch, glow from the TV flicking over his face, and thought about how time changes some things and how it does not change anything at all.</p><p>It occurred to her that meeting him, saving his life, was a matter of timing.</p><p>*</p><p>When Ada was little, her mother warned her about Americans. Don’t ever fall in love with one. They are like peaches. Too sweet. Always touching, hugging and swooning. A nightmare, really. But the American shows were how her mother learned English. <em>Friends</em>, <em>Saved by the Bell</em> and <em>I Love Lucy</em>, Ada remembered all those cloying scenes from her youth. She balked at the gestures even as she longed for them: the length of someone’s body pressed to her in bed, the hands in her hair, caressing down her arms. She tucked these images away like old cherished photos in her memory.</p><p>Consider this: the memory of her mother driving her and Hana to school, years before sickness would claim them both. Cancer and overworking, depression, apocalypse. All words they did not yet know.</p><p>Ada liked to think of it as a darkroom of pictures she had snapped in her head, as if to say <em>remember this</em>, <em>come here</em>, <em>be here with me</em>.</p><p>Because that was one thing about being a spy. You could spend a lifetime observing people, attuning your eye to every peculiar detail. But what did any of it add up to? Just a collection of disparate images, glossy photos she laid out on the floor, tacked up to walls in pursuit of the truth: Who are you? Where are you going?</p><p>With the people she loved, she could not say that she ever found a sufficient answer. And when she turned the questions on herself, she knew even less.</p><p>Here was one: who am I, without you to tell me I exist?</p><p>*</p><p>In the morning, she runs her fingers down Leon’s shoulder blade, across the soft, fine hairs on his arm. They had fallen asleep together, too tired for sex but now, being this close, she can’t stop touching him.</p><p>“You’re still here,” he says, waking up.</p><p>She hides her hands under her cheek. “Still here.”</p><p>“What you were doing before, just now” he says, closing his eyes. “It felt nice.”</p><p><em>This is not what I signed up for, </em>she thinks. She wishes there were a procedure, something like a written contract for how to navigate intimacy. What about the terms? The conditions? Is there a cancellation clause if I am not happy?</p><p>She winces. The capitalist language of spies won’t help her in this situation.</p><p>She sees an opening when he turns onto his back. He starts talking about the movie. There, a common language.</p><p>“Question," he says. "When Faye sneaks into the guy’s house, rearranges all his stuff. Do you think he knew all along that she was there?”</p><p>“No,” Ada says, sure of herself. “He was so caught up in his past, he wasn’t paying attention. Would you notice?”</p><p>“If you snuck into my apartment?” he asks.</p><p>“Yes. And moved around all your things.”</p><p>“Maybe I wouldn’t care. Maybe I would let you.”</p><p>*</p><p>The credits rolled. Ada put Chungking Express back in its VHS box and set it on Leon’s shelf beneath the TV, next to Fallen Angels and In the Mood for Love. He had taste. She could appreciate that. In the kitchen, he poured two glasses of water over ice.</p><p>She touched the glass to her collarbone and mouth. Her lips stung from the cold, leaving behind a red mark.</p><p>By midnight, she knew she wasn’t going home. Not when Leon started washing dishes, humming “California Dreamin’” which had played several times during the movie. Not when his singing voice scraped and settled low in her rib cage like that. Not a chance.</p><p>Leon toweled off his hands. He put away the dishes and cups and silverware. He knelt to open a cabinet under the kitchen sink and rooted around for something and she came up beside him, put her hand on the back of his neck. Smoothed the boyish wave of his hair.</p><p>He palmed the cabinet shut. For a moment they just looked at each other.</p><p>When he stood, he put his hands on her waist. They were cold and wet from the tap and dampened the silk when he touched her, drawing her close.</p><p>“Hey,” he said, his voice whisper-light.</p><p>“Hi,” she said back, thinking how silly it was to greet each other after all these years, and then he kissed her.</p><p>She could taste the sangria they had shared at dinner, rosy and sweet on his breath. They kissed for a while and then her palm slid to his chest and gently pushed. His lips were stained. She rubbed the corner of his mouth with her thumb, dragged the color to his tongue so he could taste it.</p><p>Her heart was a wingbeat in her ears. He kissed her hair. She didn’t want him to stop.  His lips moved across her skin with care and slow, so slow. <em>I missed you</em>, he said, <em>god, I’ve missed you</em> and how long had it been since anyone held her like that? She felt for the metal line of his zipper and he sighed into her neck.</p><p>In the living room, he lifted her up on a long, wooden table. Ada guessed this was probably where ate his meals, said his grace twice a day like a good, middle class boy and she gasped at the initial shock of it, the cold, hard surface under her bare ass when he hitched up her dress. A hardcover book smacked the floor. The table creaked and rocked. When Leon stepped between her legs and pulled her against him, she was a woman on fire. She gripped the edges of the table. She felt his fingertips brush against the edges of her underwear, slipping two beneath the fabric. She was aching and soaked.</p><p>Then the phone in his pocket rang.</p><p>“Don’t you dare,” she said.</p><p>“I have to.”</p><p>He kissed her mouth, said <em>sorry</em>, <em>sorry</em>, laughing when she tugged on his shirt collar. The ringtone was an insistent vibration, buzzing on and off, and he pulled away to answer the call.</p><p>It took a few minutes of eavesdropping for Ada to realize the person on the other line, calling at 12:23 a.m. from the suburbs of Paris, was Claire.</p><p> </p><p>She readjusted her dress, listening to the conversation as Leon paced around. Apparently Claire was flying to New York earlier than she had planned, and she would be staying for a while. Chris then jumped on the line to say hi, said he hoped Leon wasn’t too lonely in the big city, hoped he didn’t miss the Midwest too much, ha-ha, and Leon said <em>you have no idea</em>.</p><p>When it was clear he had no intentions of ending the call, Ada went to the bathroom, locked it, and sat on the lip of the bath. Like the rest of his apartment, it was spare and clean. A tiny succulent was placed on the sink, next to the soap. A green hand towel hung on the wall. Beneath her feet, Ada focused on the floral patterns in the tile until new shapes emerged, swell of human bodies breathing in slow motion. She stepped into the tub. She lowered herself inside.</p><p>On a ceramic shelf were Leon’s shampoos and she twisted open the cap on one of them and sniffed. Herbal Essence, cucumber melon scent.</p><p>She could still hear his voice muffled through the walls.</p><p>In the bath, Ada watched the faucet leak cold water onto her toes, wetting the red polish, and waited for the flare of jealousy and irritation to subside. Jealous because he had a person in this world to call him and say <em>hey, I'm on my way there</em> and irritated that she had to listen to all of it. She thought about those nights she had spent calling a person who didn’t exist in this world anymore. The dead silence. She calculated the time difference between Paris and New York. Claire’s morning was Leon’s night.</p><p>When she left the bathroom, Leon was waiting in the hallway, hands in his pockets, and she nearly bumped into him. He looked surprised to see her there. If he came any closer, she would have screamed.</p><p>She walked past him.</p><p>In the living room, Ada sat on the floor. Beside her, Mira had sprawled out on the shag rug and Ada scratched at the dog’s belly.</p><p>“I’m sorry about that,” Leon said. “I honestly thought it was a work call.”</p><p>“It’s fine,” Ada said without any heat.</p><p>Leon was quiet for a moment or two then sat on the couch.</p><p>“You okay?” he asked.</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“You were in there for a while. I was worried,” he said.</p><p>Ada poked at the bell on Mira’s collar.</p><p>“She usually doesn’t call that late.”</p><p>“Usually?”</p><p>“Claire and I…” he began. “We have a history.”</p><p>To this, Ada said nothing. Of course they shared a history. She wasn’t naïve to that fact. He’d told her about it over the phone a few months ago, hadn’t he?</p><p>“She’s like family to me at this point. That’s all,” he said.</p><p>She couldn’t help it. The word family landed like a stab. And though she wanted to tell him how lucky he was, anger and hurt made her get up too quickly. “You hold onto that then,” Ada said, and she meant it. She gathered her purse off the kitchen island. A headache seared behind her eyes. It was almost one in the morning.</p><p>“Ada.” He walked over to her.</p><p>“It’s late. I should get home, Leon,” she said.</p><p>“Are you sure?”</p><p>“Yes,” she said, harsher than she meant for it to sound, but now he was closer than the nearest exit and she only wanted to go to him.</p><p>He leaned against the center island, and his tone was soft and pleading when he said it. “Don’t leave.”</p><p>She put her hands on his shoulders, unsure whether to shake or embrace him. There was a time when she'd had the same thought. When she would not let him go, after she had taken off his shirt to tear it into strips, after she had wrapped it over the bullet wound and held his head in her lap, thought <em>stay with me, stay with</em> <em>me goddammit</em>. That day, it was his blood she found caked under her nails.</p><p>In the kitchen, she pressed her cheek to where his heart would be, listening, making sure. Yes. Still there.</p><p> </p><p>At Duane Reade, she picked up a few things from the travel size aisle: toothbrush, foam cleanser, cotton pads to remove her makeup. He paid for everything. What a pair, Ada thought, standing in line with him at the cashier. Both of us with one foot in the past, which might as well be the grave. Anyone else looking at them would only see a couple buying toiletries.</p><p>“Did you want the bed? I could take the couch,” Leon offered when they got back, and Ada said <em>don’t be ridiculous</em> which was just her way of saying <em>please don’t leave me alone</em>.</p><p> </p><p>He dragged the zipper on her dress all the way down her spine, kissed the exit wound scar on the back of her shoulder. Right then Ada wanted to sink her teeth into his heart.</p><p>“You could be going to bed with a zombie,” she said, as if to deter him. “I could tear your skin open with my teeth.”</p><p>“That’s very macabre of you,” he said, planting another kiss on her neck.</p><p>“That doesn’t scare you?” she asked.</p><p>“I’ve lived through worse.”</p><p>As always, he was polite, turning around so she could change into one of his band shirts. The dress made a puddle of flowers at her feet. He spooned her in bed, but not too close, and held her until she drifted off.</p><p>*</p><p>Outside, rain lightly patters the window and Ada allows herself to unlock and expand, a sensation like letting her body drift in open water, and everything is fine, fine, fine. She deserves this. She does. She rubs behind Leon’s neck and plays with his sleep-mussed hair. He smells like yesterday’s cologne, bright florals and sandalwood.</p><p>“I’m realizing how much I’ve missed that,” he says when she scratches above his ears.</p><p>“Missed what? Head scratches?” she teases.</p><p>“Being close to someone.”</p><p>“Has it been that long?”</p><p>“Mm,” he says but when she asks how long exactly, he won’t answer. His arms encircle her waist and she can feel the entire length of his body pressed to hers, solid and strong.</p><p>“Can I show you something?” she says. She pulls back the hem of her shirt, revealing a scar that has formed jagged and white on her left thigh. “Remember this?”</p><p>He leans. “Oh,” he says.</p><p>“Looks bad, huh?”</p><p>“Better than the last time I saw it.”</p><p>“You wanted to carry me,” she says, smiling.</p><p>He traces the outline of her scar, like he is writing to her in code. “Can you blame me?” he says, “I was young. And you were this badass. I wanted to be like you. Or near you, at least.”</p><p>“You’re like a peach,” she murmurs.</p><p>“What was that?”</p><p>“You’re very sweet.”</p><p>His eyes rest on her mouth. “Not always,” he says, then kisses her in a way that feels like a promise. A hot ache spreads between her legs. She straddles him and takes off her shirt.</p><p>He runs his hands over her hips, biting his lip at the sight of her. “Jesus.”</p><p>“Sorry,” Ada says, “he isn’t here right now,” and he laughs, a sound she is growing to love these days.</p><p>“Tell me what you want to do to me,” she says.</p><p>Leon does not say anything, just lets out a breath when she shifts on top of his erection.</p><p>“That’s not an answer.”</p><p> “Come here.”</p><p>He catches her around the waist, drawing her against him so fast, she is stunned. She pulls him on top, an anchor she wraps herself around, and she has not forgotten this kind of warmth, the pounding in her ears and the arms locked around her. <em>Let’s stay like this</em>, she doesn’t say.</p><p>“Do you want to keep going?” Leon asks.</p><p>“Yeah,” she says on a quick breath.</p><p>She helps him out of his shirt, kissing him frantic and hard, until he is the one who breaks away. <em>Easy</em>, he says. He smooths the hair out of her eyes but the kindness in his voice cuts her. She tries to shake him off and she is not crying. Not now. <em>Ada</em>, he says, and then <em>it’s okay it’s okay</em>. He asks if she wants to stop and she swipes at her tears and nods fast like yes I’m fine and please just touch me all I am asking is for you to touch me. So he does. He pushes down on her bottom lip with his thumb, says <em>tell me</em> <em>what you want</em>, and she is not crying, she is a woman ablaze when she says <em>this</em>. <em>You</em>.</p><p>*</p><p>What else won’t she tell him? Those first months of New York, she looked for anyone who resembled him in parts. Dark blonde women. Blue-eyed men in fleece-trimmed denim jackets. <em>There were so many of you, and none of them were you</em>. She went home with them anyway. Closed her eyes, touched their faces with her palms, as if she could read their histories through touch. Still. <em>None of them were you</em>.</p><p>*</p><p>She had a mantra in the art room and it comes back to her now, those words, like the muscle memory of old love. <em>I am a landscape</em>, she thinks when Leon moves down her body, kissing her breasts, belly, the insides of her thighs, like she is treasure and he is finding her before anyone else does.</p><p>****</p><p>She opens her legs slowly, lets that be his invitation. Take, drink. He presses his mouth between her thighs and kisses like he could swallow her whole. She would let him. His tongue slides around her clit and she sighs, petting his hair. She rocks under his face. She tells him <em>faster, faster</em>, and he presses down on her stomach to keep her steady when she starts to shake, and she is almost there and <em>that’s it baby</em>, body arched, head tipped back back back, and when she moans, she is loud. Her legs quiver. Her face feels hot.</p><p>After she comes, she is too sensitive, but Leon is committed apparently. She takes hold of his hair and pulls, hard, because he won’t stop licking. Then the sensitivity melts away when she looks up.</p><p>She has to admit, there are few things more delicious than seeing a pretty white boy down on his knees to please her. Her body floods with a pleasant chill, and watching him do it makes her come a second time.</p><p>When he slides up, he takes her hand and puts it around his cock. She feels firmness and heat. His breath hitches when she strokes him, slowly at first, cupping his balls, and then back and forth. In between moans, he tells her the box of condoms is in a drawer and it’ll just take a second and she strokes him faster, says <em>then go and get it for me</em>.</p><p>She savors the taste when he kisses her deeply, her fluid on his tongue.</p><p>“You feel amazing,” he pants. Inside her he feels hard and hot, it almost hurts. She grabs his ass while he moves, and he makes a soft, needful sound in the back of his throat and then they have to stop because he is almost there. “It’s okay,” she says. Then she gets on top, watching his lips part to say <em>god</em> when she starts to move. Sex is a theater, she has learned. Everyone plays a role and lately she has found hers. <em>You’re mine</em>, she whispers, and he doesn’t have to think, he grasps the sheets and says <em>yes</em>. <em>You like that, don’t you?</em> <em>Yes</em>, over and over. Riding his cock, feeling the blood surge beneath his skin. It is euphoric. She buries her face into his neck, inhales the musk of his sweat. He says <em>tell me where you want it</em> and the second she answers, he pulls out, working himself to orgasm on top of her. He takes off the condom. He does it fast and he is gorgeous.</p><p>Fingering herself, she studies every part: the contortion of his face, his swollen mouth panting a string of curses in the moment of release. That final moan, the jerk in his hips like he is fucking his hand. The muscles in his stomach as they tighten and let go.</p><p>His semen hits the air twice and thins out, trickling down his stomach, over his fist, and landing on her body. It’s what she usually imagines when she needs to come fast. She cries out, pulsing around her fingers. Both of them are flushed and slicked-wet.</p><p>She reaches for his cock and holds him until he goes soft in both of their hands, and all she can hear is their breathing.</p><p>****</p><p>After they clean up, Ada lies down on her stomach, hugging the pillow. A blue light slants in through the picture window with a flurry of dust motes. There is no thunder, but the rain hasn’t stopped.</p><p>He grazes the tip of his nails up and down her back.</p><p>“I can’t believe I would have given this up,” she says.</p><p>“Given what up?”</p><p>“This life. If I’d kept on doing whatever I was doing. Being a fucking spy.”</p><p>She turns to face him. “You want to know the best part about being an art model?” she asks. “Guess.”</p><p>“Tell me.”</p><p>“You never have to wear a uniform.”</p><p>“Tempting,” he says.</p><p>She touches his bullet scar, a wrinkled and pale blotch of skin, indented in the center. It is a mirror image of her own. “You should try it some time.”</p><p>“Say you were called back in for one last job,” he says. “Would you do it?”</p><p>She laughs. “It doesn’t work like that.”</p><p>“Hypothetical.”</p><p>“If it was my choice, maybe. The money was good. Really good. And sometimes it was thrilling, you know, the freedom to be whoever I chose. That’s funny, isn’t it? Illusions feel a lot like freedom at first. Anyway. I have a very quiet life now, Leon. I’d like to hold onto that quiet.”</p><p>She nudges him. “Unless you have an assignment for me.”</p><p>“No,” he says, looking away. Something runs across his face but Ada can’t place it.</p><p>“What’s bothering you,” she says.</p><p>“No I just… I have a lot on my mind. Work, you know.”</p><p>“Don’t overdo it,” she says. “When the job becomes a hole, that’s the worst thing you can do. You fall right in.”</p><p>“I study serial rapists and murderers for a living.”</p><p>“You know what I mean.”</p><p>“I do, I do. Fuck.”</p><p>He settles in next to her, cheek smushed to the pillow, and Ada kisses his earlobe, the pink curls and hollows of it.</p><p>She hears the <em>pat-pat-pat</em> of Mira’s footsteps in the hallway, the tinkling of a bell that signals <em>now, I am here</em>.</p><p>His eyes turn down when he smiles. She saves that detail, the small creases.</p><p>They are two naked bodies breathing in the quiet.</p><p>“Do you miss her?” she asks.</p><p>“Miss who?”</p><p>“Ada Wong.”</p><p>He pauses. “I guess I never really knew her. Maybe I should stop calling you that.”</p><p> “No. I don’t mind. You’re the only person who does.”</p><p>How else to affirm her existence without someone else telling her: <em>you are, you are</em>.</p><p>She reaches for him in the blue light of the morning, she reaches out and holds on. She thinks of all the people across the city coming home or getting lost, someone getting their heart broken, someone leaving this world and someone just coming into it, eyes up, ragged breath, wailing mouth for the first time. And here she is, body bent on dove-white sheets and he is combing her tangled hair with his fingers. This small mercy of a life. Give me this, she thinks, let me have this. He brings his forehead to hers and this is how she will remember him, <em>come closer</em>, and they hold that pose for as long as it takes her to say <em>I am here. I am here. So are you.</em></p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>;o; I'm back. Over a month of writer's block, but I think it's gone now. I needed some space to work on other projects too. Also, I have never written smut before, so that stumped me for a while!</p><p>Since Claire is mentioned, this is just a heads up that she will be appearing at some point, but *not* in a way that pits her against Ada. I love both characters, but the question of "Who will Leon end up with?" isn't one I'll be writing about. You all know how much I love aeon at this point :)</p><p>It's probably obvious that I love Wong Kar-wai too. *_* In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express both reminded me of Leon and Ada's relationship, not so much in a literal sense, but just that feeling of desire and melancholy when it comes to thwarted love. They are quiet movies, but I'd very much recommend them if you haven't seen them already! ALSO: the poem from which the beginning quote is from can be found <a href="https://twitter.com/paige_m_lewis/status/956173842447179776?lang=en">here</a>. I can't say enough good things about Paige Lewis's work. They make me weep. &lt;3 &lt;3</p><p>I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and I'm sorry for how long it took! For updates, feel free to follow me <a href="https://visualheresy.tumblr.com/">on tumblr</a> &lt;3</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. all is swept along</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It’s the dog that gets them out of bed for her morning walk. After Leon gets dressed and heads out with Mira, Ada is left alone. She prefers it that way. “I’m a little tired,” she’d said and winked after Leon had offered for her to come along, because it was one thing to sleep with a friend and quite another to accompany him on his morning errands, something a girlfriend or a spouse might do. Boundaries, she thought. In the living room, she admires the overall neatness of Leon’s bookcase and then his countertops in the kitchen, can almost see her blurry reflection in the cool, gray marble. She settles into the quiet, assured by the fact he will be home soon, and that alone is comforting, to know someone is coming back to her.</p>
<p>In the kitchen, she catches a glimpse of photos taped to the fridge, warm and sepia-toned. In two of them, a little blonde girl smiles at the camera, holding a stuffed animal. In another, a young woman is lying on her side. It’s a close-up shot, hazy at the edges. Long brown hair has fallen over the woman’s face, but from her eyes, Ada can tell she is smiling. She knows this must be Claire.</p>
<p>Leon hasn’t brought up the subject since their phone call over a month ago, but she imagines he and Sherry were very close after Claire left. She wonders where Sherry is now. She would be about sixteen. What does she remember about her parents? About the outbreak or the city she used to live in? Or has time turned her memories vague and grainy, like weather seen through a dusty windowpane, in an attempt to keep her brain safe? There are so many ways to heal, and Ada knows forgetting is one of them.</p>
<p>It is possible she will find all of this out when Claire gets here. Until then, she won’t ask Leon anything about his past. They have a real opportunity here, to start over and fix things. If she treads carefully, they might even get through September in one piece, despite the anniversary coming up. She just has to be cautious. Sweet, but cautious.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>When he gets back, she is reading The Lover by Marguerite Duras, naked on the couch. <em>The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any center to it. No path, no line. </em>She reads these sentences out loud to Leon when he asks what she is up to, after he sits on the arm of the couch and strokes her hair.</p>
<p>“Sounds mysterious,” he says.</p>
<p>“You haven’t read it?”</p>
<p>“Got it as a gift. Claire’s big on French literature, but I haven’t had the time to read it yet. Is it any good?”</p>
<p>She closes the novel, faced with a young woman’s portrait on the cover. “It’s circular,” she answers. “It feels like taking a plunge into a dark lake. I don’t know where I’m going to end up.”</p>
<p>“So… that’s a good thing?”</p>
<p>“It could be. I’ll have to see it to the end.”</p>
<p>His palms are warm on her shoulders. “Why don’t you take it home with you? You can talk to Claire about it in a few weeks.”</p>
<p>She drums her fingers against the book. “So you want me to meet her.”</p>
<p>“If you want,” Leon says, going around the other side of the couch. “I was thinking, we could have dinner one night. All of us. Nice place in Midtown. Up to you, anyway.”</p>
<p>She considers the idea. Holds the novel to her chest, hoping to channel some of the narrator’s fearlessness. She stretches her legs. “Could be nice, I suppose. Survivors’ reunion of sorts.”</p>
<p>“Something like that.” He gets on the couch, knees between her legs, props her ankles over his shoulders. She bites her lip.</p>
<p>“Go ahead,” he nods to the book in her hands. “I want to hear it.”</p>
<p>She resumes her place in The Lover, reading from page 22, while Leon eats her out…<em>all is swept along by the deep and headlong storm</em>… It takes great effort to keep her voice from shaking. In the end, she drops the book, all restraint shedding away and raw impulse taking over, letting him placate her muffled wants. After all, she has held back for so long.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>“You have to know when to stop,” her mother would say, in response to her eldest daughter coming home late from the city night after night. Ada had been looking for jobs in film after college, an industry her mother scoffed at for its unreliability. Where was the 401k? The insurance benefits? Where was the lucrative career in medicine or finance? “You are throwing it away,” her mother had said once, meaning <em>her</em> dreams, <em>her</em> youth, and Ada didn’t have the heart to tell her about the failed casting calls, one after another, those bus trips to and from the city, watching echoes of light in the Lincoln tunnel on the way home. Instead she would lie about the long and unpredictable hours on set, and go to house parties with her friends in Greenpoint or Chinatown. Meanwhile, all the casting directors gave her the same line: “You’re just not what we’re looking for. Best of luck.”</p>
<p>Much of her life had felt like this, as if she’d been assigned a role at birth and she couldn’t figure out her own capacities, couldn’t see where the role ended and where her real life began.</p>
<p>Sometimes, on the train from Queens into Manhattan, she maps out the parameters of her real life: she is, at best, a nobody civilian contracting mundane jobs to fill her time and paying rent with her dead parents’ life insurance payouts. On paper, she has a name that has changed twice since birth. Once, at immigration. Once, after Racoon City. The only person who still calls her Ada is right here, getting fucked by her on the couch, pants pushed down to his ankles. She wishes her mother was alive to walk in on them. What would she think of him? Her only friend, besides the dogs she looks after.</p>
<p>Her only friend.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Once, at a job interview in Chicago, months after getting discharged from the hospital, she was questioned on her former employer.</p>
<p>“I see you’ve worked for Umbrella quite recently. That must have been an ordeal, considering.”</p>
<p>“Actually, it was very corporate. We didn’t know about…” Ada hesitated, calculating a response. Her interviewer was a middle-aged white woman with blonde hair pulled tight into a bun. Ada thought she looked like Phoebe Buffay from Friends, except humorless. “It was difficult,” she said finally. “But I managed.”</p>
<p>The woman wrote something in the margins of Ada’s resume. “Tell me about your experience there. Executive Assistant at one of the biggest pharmaceutical names in the Midwest. You must have learned a few things.”</p>
<p>I learned how to kill a man, she might have answered. I learned how to impersonate an FBI agent and roughly patch up a bullet wound. I should be in prison or I should be dead.</p>
<p>The woman folded her hands on the metal desk, the kind you’d see in an interrogation office. Ada felt sick.</p>
<p>“I’m sorry,” she said, swallowing hard, and got up, left the room. The woman, who was the HR manager, did not call for her. No one did, and two weeks later, she filed for a petition to change her name. By the turn of the millennium, she was living in Shin-Osaka, Japan, hostessing in a gaijin bar under the name of Meiko, after the actress Meiko Kaji. Her co-workers would call her shurayukihime, <em>carnage snow princess</em>, when introducing her to new clients. Every night, she was someone else.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>In the shower, she gets the song “Aki” stuck in her head, unable to recall the exact words or meaning. Leon has washed the conditioner from her hair.</p>
<p>“What’s on your mind?” he asks.</p>
<p>“Just a song.”</p>
<p>“That's it?”</p>
<p>“Yeah. It’s not important.” Embracing him, she closes her eyes, the water misting her face. “I can’t remember the lyrics," she says.</p>
<p>“How does it go?”</p>
<p>“Does it matter?”</p>
<p>He traces the curve of her ear. “It does.”</p>
<p>She waits a beat, working up the nerve, and she doesn’t know why this is harder than explaining your job history to a stranger. She hums the melody, quietly hitting the wrong notes at first. Then memory retrieves broken phrases like ano hito wa and kaearanai, which was a word she used when a Japanese boy had asked her when she would return to America. Kaearanai, she said. <em>I won’t</em>.</p>
<p>The water turns to steam, enveloping their bodies. She listens to it hiss as it strikes the tile and the glass door. She sings quietly as a person running through their sins in a confessional.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>While Leon rinses off, she throws on one of his white t-shirts heaped in a corner of his room. Smashing Pumpkins, skinny red heart scrawled on the front.</p>
<p>His closet is full of black suits and button ups, slacks and leather jackets, one of which is brown with faux shearling trim, and Ada strokes the leather sleeves. It looks warm and expensive.</p>
<p>“Nice shirt,” he says. She turns to see him in the doorway with a towel wrapped around his waist. “You finished snooping?”</p>
<p>“Almost.”</p>
<p>His skin is wet to the touch. He sits at the foot of the bed, and she gets on top of him. “Question for you,” he says.</p>
<p>“Shoot.”</p>
<p>“Why did you decide to come back?”           </p>
<p>She smiles. “Are you interrogating me? I thought it was your day off.”</p>
<p>“It’s just weird how we ended up in the same place.”</p>
<p>“Like it was fate?”</p>
<p>“Yeah, maybe.”</p>
<p>“Well don’t give fate too much credit. I got deported for overstaying my visa. And working illegally. So now, I am banned from returning to Japan for five years.”</p>
<p>“Holy shit. Seriously?”</p>
<p>“How does it feel to be sleeping with a criminal?” She pushes him down to the bed, hair falling around his face like a dark curtain. She makes a note to herself to cut it soon.</p>
<p>“That’s not how I see you.”</p>
<p>“Mr. Idealistic," she says, then kisses him. “Any more questions for me?”</p>
<p>“One more. What do you want for breakfast?”</p>
<p>Before she brings up the subject of how to spend the rest of their day together, the botanical gardens in Brooklyn and Hakubai on Park Avenue, he traces the drawing of a heart on her chest, and she will know this joy for another two weeks, before reality sets her straight.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>She loses her job when the summer’s drawing classes come to an end. On her last day, a final critique is held among the students, self portraits on newsprint pinned to the wall, and it is like she is seeing their faces for the very first time. At the end, everyone claps. The orchestral jazz on the boombox is turned off. The instructor gives her a list of names of schools and galleries to call, <em>it was a pleasure getting to know you</em> and <em>good luck</em>. She thanks him, then tosses the list into a garbage can outside while waiting for the pedestrian light.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Her trouble begins with the woman on the L train. Ada notes the khaki trenchoat and sunglasses, the same outfit she used on her last mission. The woman doesn’t utter a word, just follows Ada to Grand Street Station and sits a few rows behind her on the Q59 bus. She does this for a week straight. One day, when the bus stops at 61<sup>st</sup> street on her way home, Ada buys lunch at a Colombian bakery, several blocks from her apartment, thinking maybe she is just being paranoid. But no. Outside, the woman is right there across the street, smoking a cigarette. Her sunglasses are tinted and bug-eyed. Her blonde hair is curly and cropped above her ears.</p>
<p>The silver lining: she had the good sense to come alone. Ada crosses the street and leans against the same shutter, close enough that she can see the blonde’s chapped lips puckered around the cigarette, a few hair-thin wrinkles on her chin. The woman stiffens her shoulders, tips her head down, as if embarrassed.</p>
<p>“Next time you want to follow someone,” Ada says, clutching her paper bag, “you might want to keep your distance.”</p>
<p>The woman blows out a small ring of smoke. “I beg your pardon?”</p>
<p>“Drop the act. Where did you come from, anyway? Some kind of private eye agency? That uniform isn't exactly subtle."</p>
<p>“For christ’s sake.” The woman crushes the cigarette under her boot. “No. I’m from Chicago originally. Came here to see it for myself.”</p>
<p>“See what?" </p>
<p>“That you were still alive. Living out here, in Queens of all places. You’re not an easy person to find, Ada.” Taking off her glasses, the woman turns so Ada can have a better look. She is white, hazel-eyed, completely nondescript save for the pocked acne scars on her cheeks. Nothing about her is familiar, and then she says it. “That was the name my husband gave you, wasn’t it?”</p>
<p>A flush creeps up Ada’s neck. Had Umbrella sent a spy to cut off loose ends? She doesn’t respond, afraid that anything she says could be taken as damning evidence.</p>
<p>“Let me back up," the woman says. "My name is Ellen Rhodes. You worked with my husband Mike on a job a few years ago. You’re the last person who saw him alive, correct?”</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>As it turned out, Ellen Rhodes had hired the cheapest private eye agents she knew, a recommendation off Craigslist, and tracked Ada down to her cramped studio in Queens. So that is where they go. Ada takes off her cardigan once they enter her apartment, already sweating in her tank top. She makes cranberry vodkas upon Ellen's request then sits across from her at the table, willing herself to not down the entire glass. It is Monday, not even 2:30 yet.</p>
<p>“Do you live with someone?” Ellen wrinkles her nose at the drink. Too much Tito’s, perhaps.</p>
<p>“Do I look like I live with someone?”</p>
<p>“What about the boyfriend? Are you expecting him?”</p>
<p>“Who?”</p>
<p>“The police officer you hang around with. He looks very young.”</p>
<p>Ada clears her throat. “He’s not… How long have you been following me?”</p>
<p>“Little over a month.” Ellen takes out a photo from her purse and slides it across the table. It is a picture of her husband, Mike Rhodes, but not as Ada remembers him. In the photo, he is clean-shaven with a full, bright smile. He is wearing a green flannel shirt and standing on what looks to be a cliff, yellow flowers peeking through jagged rocks. He could be an everyman, not a kidnapper or a rapist. Ada looks at him and feels a dull fury edging around her bones.</p>
<p>“Ithaca, New York,” Ellen says. “This was taken a year before he disappeared.”</p>
<p>“Is that all?” Ada takes a long pull of her drink.</p>
<p>“I guess I’ll get right to it then. What do you remember about my husband?”</p>
<p>“That’s what you flew over 700 miles to ask me?”</p>
<p>“I’m just trying to find him.”</p>
<p>Ada studies the widow's pinched forehead, certain this must be a joke. “Well. What do you know so far?”</p>
<p>“I know he went on a business trip that last week in Raccoon City. He said he was going with an associate and that associate was you. He was very adamant about this trip. He said it would change the course of our lives, would make us whole again.”</p>
<p>“So he was a big talker.”</p>
<p>“He could be, yes. That’s why I’m surprised. That he never mentioned anything to you about having a wife.”</p>
<p>Ada scratches at the inner corners of her eyes, tired of this woman’s prying. “No, and we weren’t involved in the way you think. I worked for him, that was all.”</p>
<p>“Can you tell me anything about where he is, or where he could be?”</p>
<p>At this, Ada tenses up, staring at her drink. The cranberry makes it gleam red like fake blood. “What’s there to tell? There was a zombie outbreak. He was there, and then he wasn’t.”</p>
<p>“What does that even mean?”</p>
<p>“It means he was eaten alive. Is that all you came here to find out?”</p>
<p>Disgusted by the woman's silent weeping, Ada snatches her untouched glass, tosses the contents in the sink, red splatter on steel. She runs the faucet. Grips the countertop edge. Counts down from twenty. When she turns around, Ellen is hugging herself, small as a shivering child.</p>
<p>“I’m sorry,” Ada says. “But I don’t know what it is you want me to say. That your husband was a good person? That I’m sad he’s gone? Because he wasn’t. And I’m not.”</p>
<p>“I thought if I asked the right questions, it would help me understand…” Ellen scoffs a little, voice breaking. “But all I’m left with are more questions.”</p>
<p>It isn’t the same, but Ada can’t help drawing comparisons. The day she and Leon spoke in the park, she wanted to believe a reconciliation would begin and end there. Now she wonders how much Leon is holding back, if he is simply waiting for her to fuck him over again, if their attempt at normalcy isn’t proof of anything at all, but a masked performance.</p>
<p>Suddenly it dawns on her that what Ellen needed was not the truth of who her husband was in life, but her version of the truth, gilded and airbrushed like some idealistic caricature, stripped of its humanness. She almost feels sorry about it all, and then she remembers Mike, his smug face as he took off his ski mask. She remembers the smell of damp carpet. She had pissed herself waking up, wrists cable-tied to a radiator in some dank motel room the night she was kidnapped from Umbrella’s parking lot, the first time she ever saw him.</p>
<p>She takes the woman’s trench coat hanging on a hook by the door and throws it on the table.  </p>
<p>“What did he do to you?” Ellen sniffs, wiping her nose.</p>
<p>“I need you to leave,” Ada says.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Once she is alone, the door locked, Ada shuts herself inside the closet. She tips her head back and inhales the scent of moth balls and dust. Stretching out her legs, she knocks over a shoe box in a corner and it is so dark that she half expects a face to materialize from the shadows, for a voice to tell her, “All of this is your fault.” She knows there are old family photographs in the box, small ceramic trinkets from her mother, coins from her father’s porcelain nightstand dish, a mixtape her sister made that Ada started listening to once, years after she’d been gone, and couldn’t finish. She knew the tape began with “Ziggy Stardust," a Bauhaus cover, but she could never get past Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream” without breaking down. And so she dropped the cassette in an envelope and tucked it away with the rest of her family’s things inside a Louboutin shoe box, struck by how little space the dead require. Everything in its place. Out of sight.</p>
<p>“Come on Ada,” she says. “Get up.”</p>
<p>It is evening by the time she comes out, mixtape in hand, and turns on the small boombox beneath the TV. </p>
<p>*</p>
<p>“What do you get out of all this?” she had asked Mike during an exchange. After she had turned in copies of confidential paperwork—research notes, emails, legal contracts, and receipts covering a five year period—he brought up the heist in Raccoon City: secure the G-virus, and it was over for the corporation. “It’s up to you,” he had said, like she had any choice in the matter. They were sitting in his pickup truck in a Kmart parking lot. The chill from the air conditioner smelled like copper.</p>
<p>As far as she understood, the virus would be studied by The Organization’s scientists and then destroyed for the greater good. Mike was vague on the studying part, not that she cared. She asked what the split in profits would be and he said 60/40, same as before. But if she wanted to walk away and move on with her life, he wouldn’t stop her.</p>
<p>“Seriously,” she said. “And don’t say it’s the money. That would be too easy.”</p>
<p>“You need a better excuse than saving the world?”</p>
<p>“I want something that’s real. Something definitive.”</p>
<p>Neither of them spoke for a few minutes and when he finally did, she strained to hear him. “I have to believe it’s worth it in the end,” he said. “Everything I did, I did for my family, you understand? This has to work. It has to.” Right then Mike gave her a look of what she hoped was remorse, but she couldn’t be sure. His lips pursed. He gripped the steering wheel, shoulders hunched, the wheel's plastic cover flaking all over his lap.</p>
<p>“You’ve done your part, honey. And the way out is yours if you want it.”</p>
<p>The way he said honey made her want to spit at his shoes.</p>
<p>“And if I say no, what happens then? Are you going to kidnap someone else? That’s how you recruit your people, right?”  Outside, the sky was a deep blue and shopping carts were abandoned across the lot. She thought about getting out of the car and walking on forever and never having to explain herself, not to him, or anyone.</p>
<p>Mike scratched at his beard. “You take full measures in this business to get the job done. Simple as that.”</p>
<p>Ada thought it was the most stupid rationale she ever heard for assaulting a person with chloroform. It had been five months since that day. She crossed her arms, shaking, ready to boil over.</p>
<p>“So what now,” she said.</p>
<p>“You tell me.”</p>
<p>She pictured the duffel bag in her apartment, stuffed with a change of clothes and rubber-banded blocks of cash. Coupled with her parents’ insurance money, she could travel anywhere she wanted. She could afford therapy for a lifetime. Buy the most expensive house in the most expensive city in Japan. She could make a film and star as herself.</p>
<p>Or she could live as Ada Wong. Stay in the business long enough to call her own shots. Demand her own price. Grow fangs from the inside out and use her body as a weapon for the rest of her life.</p>
<p>Bonus points if it ended up dismantling a corrupt pharmaceutical company. The virus Umbrella had engineered in secret was a biological weapon. If anything, she was doing the world a favor.</p>
<p>“I have terms,” she said and looked over at Mike. “And don’t fucking call me honey ever again.”</p>
<p>He leaned back in his seat. “I’m listening,” he said.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>When Ada thinks of the girl she was then, that sense of delusion masked as fearlessness, as ruthless ambition, she feels gross.</p>
<p>It was a joke to believe she had any semblance of control. If she had said no to Mike’s offer, he probably would have killed her in her sleep and sent a cleaner to dispose the evidence.</p>
<p>She knew he kept a picture of his children tucked behind the sun visor. A teenage girl and a little boy, dark-haired and smiling on a playground. Still, she didn’t feel a thing in Raccoon City when she led him into a pack of zombies and watched from behind the police station’s iron gates as they gored his stomach with incisors and nails. She thought of those scenes in animal documentaries, a pride of female lions tearing into the pregnant belly of a zebra, snouts dripping blood and guts, ripping flesh from bone. She heard the crack of bone in someone’s teeth. She tasted bile and her skin itched from fear.</p>
<p>In the courtyard of the station, she vomited on a hedge and went inside. It would be hours before she met Leon in the underground parking lot. It would be hours before she saved his life in there for the first time, and then over and over again through the night, wondering if this was what people meant when they talked about penance.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Maybe there is no difference between taking a life and taking on a new life. A person is killed either way, even if that person is yourself.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>“You’re wrong about my name,” she had said to his wife in the downstairs lobby.</p>
<p>Ellen put on her oversized sunglasses, lips puffy from crying. Her hands trembled when she pushed the door open. She cleared her throat. “What about it?”</p>
<p>“Ada was my mother’s stage name in Hong Kong. A short lived part-time job. But it was one of the few things she ever told me about herself.”</p>
<p>Pausing in the doorway, Ellen nodded imperceptibly, like this was all the explanation she needed and then she went out, disappearing around the street.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>After "Ziggy Stardust", it’s crystal-bright synths at a faster tempo, A-ha’s “Take On Me” bouncing across the room. She is on her third cranberry vodka, minus the cranberry. Halfway through, she gets a call from Leon.</p>
<p>She turns off the music and tells him about her last day of class, careful to omit the rest of it.</p>
<p>“You’ll find something. I know you will. And look at it this way,” he says before going on about all the time she has now to pursue what she really wants, or loves. Which would make complete sense if she knew what that was.</p>
<p>She lets him believe that he has cheered her up, eager to change the subject. And though she knows the rule, knows the less information you have about a person, the less you will feel when they end up hurting you, she asks him anyway.</p>
<p>“What did you want to be when you were a kid? Before you were a cop. Was there something else you really wanted?”</p>
<p>“It’s hard to say now that I’m already here but… I wanted to build something. Houses, you know.”</p>
<p>“Like an architect?”</p>
<p>“Like the guys who actually put it together, from scratch. I wanted to be part of something bigger and when it was all said and done, you’d have this thing, right? Strong and solid, and it would last for years and years.”</p>
<p>“What changed?”</p>
<p>“My dad. He wasn’t… always on the right side of the law so to speak. Anyway, he got caught. Scammed people out of their insurance money. Hundreds of thousands of dollars.”</p>
<p>“God.”</p>
<p>“Yeah. This was years after my mom left him. We found out about it on the news. Can you believe that? Finding out that your ex husband is a die hard criminal on TV, that he got shot one day outside a nightclub in Las Cruces. She wasn’t the same after that. Not for a long time.”</p>
<p>“Oh, Leon. I’m sorry.”</p>
<p>“It’s been a while since she’s brought it up. But yeah. So that’s what changed. What about you?”</p>
<p>“Me?”</p>
<p>“Yeah, what were you good at growing up? What did you want to be?”</p>
<p>She does not tell him she was good at stealing as a kid, got a little thrill from taking things she coveted just because she could. “An actress if you could believe it,” she says.</p>
<p>“I can see that. You on the big screen.”</p>
<p>“Not on film but… do you know those old radio shows, the serial ones they had in the 30s and 40s?”</p>
<p>“What, you mean like Orson Welles War of the Worlds type of stuff?”</p>
<p>She can hear him smiling.</p>
<p>“Yes. All you needed to make a story come alive was your voice back then. Just your voice," she says. "I would listen to them, these old tape recordings we had, that my mom had, and I would sit in my room and imagine every detail. I could see it in my head. It was a kind of magic.”</p>
<p>“Oh man. I think my grandfather used to listen to those. Hey, maybe we could write one.”</p>
<p>“Us? About what?”</p>
<p>“I don’t know. Maybe about Raccoon City? Orson Welles style. Call it Rookie Cop and Lady in Red at the End of the World.” He chuckles, trying to make light of it, but the joke doesn’t quite land. There is a moment of dead air. “Too soon, right?”</p>
<p>“Yeah. Too soon.”</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Years later, after she has made a series of live-or-die choices, some she will stand by forever and some she will regret, the woman in red at the end of the world will think back to this conversation, will think <em>this is where it changed </em>and <em>why couldn't we have stayed there, right there</em>, and she will smoke her Pianissimo, crush it under the heel of her boot, and she will sit on a cliff overlooking the ocean at night, and think of everything that survived the end of the world: very old pop songs and Chinese movies and his voice over the phone, coaxing her to sleep. At the end of the world, the woman in red will tell herself a story. No path, no straight line through the end. And she will snag on this part, this chapter every time, wanting to forget, wanting to hold on.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>First, I'm so sorry for how long this took. These past few months have been rough and for a while, I got discouraged from writing. But I'm getting through it! The next update is almost done too. </p>
<p>Some news: two months ago I commissioned one of my favorite artists Amikoroyaiart and she drew <a href="https://amikoroyaiart.tumblr.com/image/629540128914817024">this gorgeous artwork of Ada and Leon</a>. Isn't it beautiful? I love it so much.</p>
<p>As always I'd be happy to know your thoughts in the comments. &lt;3 I honestly don't know if I have any readers left, but I'm happy if even one person has stuck around.</p>
<p>Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/jcavero89">jcavero89</a><br/>Tumblr: <a href="https://visualheresy.tumblr.com/">visualheresy</a></p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. stop motion</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>On the 4th anniversary of the Raccoon City bombing, Leon and Ada are forced to confront painful truths from their past. The lives Umbrella destroyed cannot be erased, and Ada must imagine a new role for herself: what she wants from the world, how she wants to change and learn within it, how she wants to be loved.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you to <a href="https://samarzart.tumblr.com/">Samarzart</a> on tumblr for painting <a href="https://64.media.tumblr.com/c281a3206fc6e707442c35c7a6bfd60d/c806c42d28703b65-47/s500x750/99b5e11a553a46d30e267a59826bf8757000d91a.png">this beautiful Leon/Ada moment</a> that I commissioned in December. I think about this image a lot.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>When they meet each other at TAO, a restaurant in Midtown, the skin under his eyes looks bruised like he hasn’t slept in years.</p>
<p>Or it has always been there, and she is just seeing it now.</p>
<p>“This isn’t the best time of year for me,” he says when she suggests he take a week off from work. “But keeping busy helps. Going out like this.”</p>
<p>“Is it helping now?’ Her palm flat above the tea candle, as if testing. There isn’t much warmth here. She has tried moving the candle centimeters toward him and then herself, watching the red-orange light dapple his chin, his cupid’s bow.</p>
<p>He cups her wrist so delicately that she almost senses an apology coming.</p>
<p>“With you, yes,” he says, then takes her home, keeping to the highways instead of the bridge because of what happened last time.</p>
<p>What happened last time was this:</p>
<p>He had been driving with his window rolled down while David Bowie's "Fascination" soared out. 70s soul made her feel sexy and talkative. She felt like sharing a secret so she did, telling him about the visitor she’d had recently, making careful omissions.</p>
<p>The story was the wife of Ada’s former colleague had begun stalking her, convinced her husband was having an affair, and she’d shown up at Ada’s apartment to find out the truth.</p>
<p>It was more or less what happened in reality.</p>
<p>“You might want to look into a restraining order,” Leon said. “Has she threatened you?”</p>
<p>“She doesn’t seem like the type. Anyway, she wasn’t wrong. Her husband and I did work together closely. But not anymore.”</p>
<p>“You still in touch with him, the guy?”</p>
<p>She looked at him. “Why would I be?”</p>
<p>“No, I was just wondering.”</p>
<p>“You’re jealous.”</p>
<p>An awkwardness settled between them before Ada caught him blushing, an opportunity to shift the spotlight off her. “So cute,” she had said and Leon was all too eager to change the subject, just as she hoped. She played along when he asked if she was taking on any new clients as a dog walker. "Do you have a spare key to your place? Are you ready for that kind of commitment?" she asked.</p>
<p>He just smiled at the road and sang with Bowie about the fever in his heart.</p>
<p>She got distracted, is how she would blame herself later.</p>
<p>For the rest of the drive, she tried to catch herself in the passenger side mirror, the shadows bringing her face in and out of focus. She watched the metallic landscape of graffiti-lashed walls, darkened storefronts and warehouses as they left Manhattan. When they crossed the bridge, she did not know it until looking down into the flat darkness of the water, her chest and stomach began to seize. The lights of the city burned. She felt sick. She stared at her hands, at the dashboard, tried to breathe slowly through her nose. Leon must have known what was happening, because he pulled over as soon as they were safely on the streets again, turned the radio off and took her hands. She grabbed at his wrists like something was pulling her out of body. Her legs were shaking. <em>It's okay honey</em>, he kept saying. <em>You're okay. You're okay.</em></p>
<p>*</p>
<p>They did not talk about it or rather, she did not want to talk about it.</p>
<p>“It’s one of those things,” she said dismissively.</p>
<p>“You mean PTSD,” he said, trying to be helpful.</p>
<p>“I mean a mistake. I should have never let you drive me.” But of course she does on this Tuesday night, because that is how she keeps busy, with the kind of sex that leaves a mind too tired and disoriented to think of anything else.</p>
<p>           *</p>
<p>Here is the moment she would paint if she were capable: he, caressing her body with such reverence, hand coming to rest on the sharp angles of her collarbone. Short, quick brushstrokes. That is how she would do it.</p>
<p>“What are you thinking about, Detective?” she asks sleepily.</p>
<p>“Just you,” he says.</p>
<p>“No sweet talking. I want to really know what’s buzzing around in that head of yours.”</p>
<p>“Yes ma’am,” he says, nuzzling closer.</p>
<p>Stroking the contours of his face, she basks in their shared warmth. Her thighs, hips, feet touching his. He is a patient man. Takes his time considering all angles to a question before he answers. And when he kissed down the length of her body an hour ago, she luxuriated in that patience. Inside her, he began with slight, rhythmic movements, only letting himself go when she had come, shaking, breathless and wet. Curled in his arms, she holds the back of his neck, waiting for him to spill his secrets.</p>
<p>“I have a favor to ask,” he says. “It’s been on my mind for a while because I know you’re not going to like it.”</p>
<p>“Why wouldn’t I?”</p>
<p>“And I don’t want this to end.”</p>
<p>“What is it?”</p>
<p>“Remember when you told me you’d never be a spy again? This favor sort of breaks that promise to yourself.”</p>
<p>“I don’t understand.” The word <em>spy</em> makes her sit up, like the word has snaked over her shoulders, grimy and cold. She barely hears herself over the nervous thrum of her heart. “What are you doing?”</p>
<p>“This is why I didn’t want to do this now,” he says, moving to the edge of the bed. She watches him put on his shirt and boxer shorts, and then he is silent, rubbing exhaustion from his eyes with the heel of his hand.</p>
<p>“For god’s sake just say it.”</p>
<p>“That little girl I told you about, Sherry? I need help getting her out of government custody. She’s getting experimented on.”</p>
<p>None of it makes sense to Ada as she gets off the bed, insisting that he does not touch her. She wants to ask <em>who are you?</em> <em>who the fuck are you right now?</em> but to ask it would mean she has been alone for the past two months with a stranger, vulnerable and alone.</p>
<p>“Is this some kind of game you’re playing at?”</p>
<p>“This isn’t a game. Hey. Look at me. This isn’t a game,” he says again, calmer this time. “All I’m asking is that you hear me out. You don’t have to agree to anything.”</p>
<p>He raises his hands, the universal signal for surrender and <em>I won’t hurt you</em>. He is not armed. There are no weapons. So why does she feel attacked? She ties a black satin robe around her waist, cinches it tight. “Then talk,” she says.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>For the next half hour Leon explains the situation, which is that up until a month ago, he had been allowed to visit Sherry in California under government supervision. That is, until he noticed the bruises inside her elbows during one such visit, which Sherry would try to hide, and after questioning the guards about it, Leon had not been permitted to see her again. She was getting on with her life after all, she was a junior in high school, his handler assured him over the phone. <em>Let her move on</em>, Leon was told, <em>because frankly, your visits have been upsetting her</em>.</p>
<p>Sherry had admitted to him once that the bruises came from “wellness checks,” where her blood was drawn into several vials. Upon hearing this, one of the supervising agents called their visiting session to an end. Sherry would not mention it again, instead diverting the conversation to her hobbies and favorite books, and the next time he saw her, she hardly talked at all.</p>
<p>She looked unhappy and sick.</p>
<p>It starts to add up for Ada. Leon’s emotional distance and troubled moods, which she had never brought up, assumed they would clear up on their own without her prying. It wouldn’t be the first time she had failed to ask the right questions, to be attentive to someone she claimed to care about. The shame makes her feel heavy.</p>
<p>“I’m not the only person you’ve asked for help,” she says after a few minutes. “You told me about Claire, what you two went through with Sherry. Does she know about this?”</p>
<p>A hint of relief crosses Leon’s face and he stops pacing her apartment. “Remember that phone call the first time you came over? Claire and me, we weren’t just catching up that night. We were talking about it then, how we’d pull it off, getting Sherry out of there. They’re my family, Ada. I can’t let this go.”</p>
<p>“So what have you found out so far? And how are you going to get there?”</p>
<p>“There’s this friend of mine, a PI type. I got him to track down Sherry’s foster home. It’s in Del Mar, just a walk from the beach. But I can’t go.”</p>
<p>“And why’s that?”</p>
<p>“Because I’d be one of the first suspects once she’s reported missing.”</p>
<p>Ada finds a knit cardigan in her dresser and buttons herself up, shivering despite the warm September air coming through the windows. It’s clear to her now what he wants. Claire would travel to California in his stead and Ada would play backup. Would she need a gun for this? She hasn’t touched a firearm in years and even when she had, she was an amateur at best. The worry dizzies around her brain and so she attempts to lean on her practical, more rational side for support.</p>
<p>“You’re talking about child abduction here. You realize that,” she says.</p>
<p>“I’m talking about saving someone I care about,” Leon says, raising his voice.</p>
<p>“This is a lot. This is a lot you’re asking of me.”</p>
<p>“Yeah well, asking me to fetch the G-virus for you wasn’t any better.”</p>
<p>The truth sears her. Shame prickles her chest, scrapes away at the thing she has worked so hard to build. Around her heart, this fortress in open water, impenetrable. He is breaking her open.</p>
<p>“You want to play that for this?” she asks.</p>
<p>“That’s not what I’m doing.”</p>
<p>“I don’t know, Leon. From here that looks exactly like what you’re doing.”</p>
<p>Stunned for a second, he looks at his coat and umbrella thrown on the couch then swipes them up along with his keys. “You know what? It’s fine,” he says, stepping into his shoes. “If you don’t give a shit, you can just say that.”</p>
<p>“Leon.”</p>
<p>“Forget I asked. Seriously. It’s not worth it.”</p>
<p>The door slamming makes her jump and then she is only pissed at herself for letting him walk out. She could have been the kind of person to call for him, to run out the door like the protagonist of a romance novel, grabbing him by the sleeve to bring him inside, and talk until they were okay again. But years of surviving her particular traumas ensured she was not and never would be that kind of person. She committed herself to that narrative. A woman searching for the next thing to hold her over through the storm, that’s all she was. Searching for beauty with the hunger of a stray dog, chasing until it was hers before moving onto the next distraction. But grace and goodness? She didn’t know how to ask the world for what she needed. She didn’t know where to start.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>She comes to an understanding on the first day of October, when the 4<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the bombing is all over the news. Television broadcasts replay grainy aerial footage of a scorched landscape. The camera zooms in on a black depression in the earth. A line of soldiers with rifles and black masks guard the containment zone of what used to be Raccoon City while the same words scroll by: bioweapons research, T-virus trials and bankruptcy. In the basement laundry room, Ada listens to the dryer’s dead thump.</p>
<p>“Four years. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long,” she had said to Leon over the phone. She had called him during his lunch to make sure he was doing alright, given that he had told her this time of year was hard on him. It was hard on her too, but she didn’t want him to see that, to worry.</p>
<p>“Should we do something special?” he said, but she heard the irony.</p>
<p>Ada surprised herself by suggesting they spend time together after work. Usually it was Leon who initiated their plans, but today was different. She would come over, they would take their minds off the news for a while, cook, watch a movie, whatever he felt comfortable with. The gentleness returned to his voice when he said okay.</p>
<p>“How are you doing with all this?” he asked. “I mean, since the last time we—"</p>
<p>“Fine. I’ve been fine.”</p>
<p>“Convincing.”</p>
<p>“This isn’t about me.”</p>
<p>“Sure it is. You’re important to me and I want to know how you’re doing.”</p>
<p>Her face warmed when he said that. She had been to an art museum that morning, had filled her head with paintings of jeweled sunlight and pastoral fields, and the kindness of one simple phrase overwhelmed her.</p>
<p>“I’m sorry for how I walked out on you that night,” he said. “That’s not how I wanted it to be at all. The timing was so off. This whole thing—”</p>
<p>“No, don’t apologize. You were going through something this whole time and I never gave you a chance to be open about it. I want you to feel like you can tell me things. It’s okay. Whatever it is.”</p>
<p>“Thank you. Really. It means a lot to hear you say that.”</p>
<p>After they hung up, Ada checked her emails, lingering on one from the art instructor she used to model for. Aside from <em>hope you’ve been well</em>, there was a link to an article about Leonora Carrington, because he knew Ada loved her work. She made a note to read it later and gathered a basket of her dirty clothes for the laundry room, where the TV was on, blaring its tragedy like an ambulance siren.</p>
<p>This current segment hasn’t been shown before, and she wonders if Leon has seen it already.</p>
<p>In a courtroom, two former Umbrella employees prepare to take turns at the witness stand. Yoko Suzuki and Linda Baldwin, names Ada remembers seeing on an employee census for NEST.</p>
<p>On screen they look scraped away, these women. Treading over her memories, Yoko speaks carefully. Her eyes are puffy and red. She begins by describing the experiments, the ones performed on her body in a closet-sized room with cold, steel fixtures. Tissue samples were routinely extracted. Embryos too, same as Linda. That wasn’t the worst part.</p>
<p>The worst part were the holes in Yoko’s memory. One of the virologists, Dr. Greg Mueller, had operated on her brain before she left the company, to erase any memories of her employment. A failure of an experiment, as it turned out.</p>
<p>“Why did you agree to work for them?” an attorney asks Yoko. He is a white man pacing in a crisp, blue suit.</p>
<p>“The money, I suppose. Discovery,” she replies. “I had a place there. A family in the lab, you could say. I didn’t have much of that at home.”</p>
<p>“The breakthroughs in genetic research would have been astronomical,” says Linda when it is her turn to testify. “It would have changed the world. They promised us that.”</p>
<p>Briefly, Ada is reminded of a scientist she dated at the company, using him to gain access to Umbrella’s research projects. It had been her first mission. Back then, when their relationship was still new, he used to tell her that science and art weren’t so different, they were both ways of understanding the greater mystery of the world. His enthusiasm for the industry was why she had fallen in love with him.</p>
<p>His name was John Clemens and he had died in one of Umbrella’s underground facilities. It wasn’t until after her own near-death experience that she found out, when she was discharged from the hospital and searched him online, hoping to connect with the last person who had loved her.</p>
<p>The attorney begins to question Linda on her role in the company and here is the part Ada wishes she could turn off.</p>
<p>In 1998, Umbrella moved onto the next phase of its research, switching from embryos to foster children as viable test subjects. They ran a facility under the guise of an orphanage and each child was assigned a test subject number. Anyone selected to undergo clinical trials at the lab was said to have been adopted. For this reason, Umbrella sought out runaways and children from abusive homes or abducted them from loving homes when the candidate pool ran low, because who would ever find them?</p>
<p>On February 19, they were proved wrong. On that day, ten-year old Oliver Cantillo escaped NEST and ran barefoot to the orphanage, hoping to warn the other children of their fate. He was having seizures. His skin was peeling, gray-blue as ash. These were early symptoms of the T-virus. In response, the security team of the Racoon City orphanage carried out their “disposal plan” in order to prevent a spread of infection: all 140 foster children, from the ages of 2 through 14, were killed. Afterwards, Linda Baldwin had been tasked with collecting tissue samples from their bodies.</p>
<p>“Goddamn,” a man sitting at a nearby table mutters. When Ada walked in, he was already here reading a paperback novel. “Just getting to the good part and now I have to listen to this shit.”</p>
<p>Ada shoots him a glare even as she is guilty of it too, choosing complacency, choosing when to look and when to turn away from the world’s horrific knowledge. At what point was the fight against bioterrorism truly over? There had been protest marches in response to the former president’s decision to bomb Racoon City, after which he was forced to resign, having faced threats of impeachment. While Ada had been hospitalized, the civic outrage was everywhere. But then the years passed and the activist movements settled, and what was left? Just the various testimonies from people who had lost their livelihoods under Umbrella, the only way they knew how to fight. Speak up. Stand witness, they told the world.</p>
<p>When would the world speak up for them?</p>
<p>Perhaps there was no rest under any administration. Each person had a specific fight ahead of them, and it occurs to Ada that she, too, cannot count herself out of that fight.</p>
<p>She folds the rest of her clothes into a mesh bag, thinking of what Leon had asked her to do last week. Sherry’s life is in danger. Her mission: assist in extricating the subject. She hasn’t yet forgotten the language of spies. She has kept it close, wrapped around her like a dress, in case she would ever need it again.</p>
<p>She owes Leon that much.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>The skyline is a dulled gold haze when she arrives in Manhattan.</p>
<p>He opens the door still in his work clothes, black slacks and a navy button-up with the sleeves rolled to his elbows—annoyingly handsome. She crouches to pet Mira on the head and gives Leon a pointed look, trying to keep her mouth straight.</p>
<p>“What?” he says.</p>
<p>“Nothing, you just look so formal. And nice.”</p>
<p>“I was about to change before you got here. You didn’t have to bring me anything by the way,” he says, taking the plastic bags from her and setting them on the counter. She’d gone to Sunrise Mart for ingredients: rice, aji-mirin, one pack of dried seaweed, a bottle of Kewpie mayo, soy sauce and a can of tuna. Lastly, a ceramic bowl painted with smiling dogs in pastel colors. Every time she wandered the tableware section, she always ended up with an animal patterned bowl to add to her collection. They made her happy, and that was reason enough.</p>
<p>Today it was necessary.</p>
<p>“A souvenir,” she says, handing him the bowl.</p>
<p>“Oh. This is... legitimately the most adorable thing anyone’s ever given me. I love it.”</p>
<p>“Good, because you can use it once we’re done.”</p>
<p>“What are we making?”</p>
<p>“Onigiri. And this,” she says, taking out plastic containers of soup dumplings and fried mantou, “is to hold us over for now.”</p>
<p>“If you’re trying to make me fall for you, I gotta say it’s working.”</p>
<p>“Don’t push it, rookie.”</p>
<p>“Gold shield means detective,” he says, hugging her from behind. She is about to suggest they turn on some music when she hears the news channel. More interviews about the virus.</p>
<p>“That’s not staying on, is it?” she asks, pointing to the TV in his living room.</p>
<p>“No,” he says, a nervous catch in his voice. “I’m done doom-watching for today. Promise.”</p>
<p>While he goes for the remote control, Ada fills a bowl from his cabinets with water and begins washing the rice, straining and refilling until the water runs clear. It’s when she leaves the grains to soak that she notices Leon standing in front of the TV. He hasn’t turned it off yet.</p>
<p>“Hey,” she says, coming up behind him. “Are you okay?”</p>
<p>Onscreen, pictures of children flash by with their names and ages, all victims of the Raccoon City Orphanage. This information has never been released to the public before. In most of the interviews, there are parents crying. Their babies are no longer missing, but they are never coming back.</p>
<p>Grief shape-shifts eternally. How does a person make space for it all?</p>
<p>“Did you know about this?” Leon asks.</p>
<p>“Here.” Ada carefully takes the remote from his hand and presses the On/Off button. The image of a woman kneeling on a sidewalk in tears, rocking back and forth, winks into the black. She puts the remote on the coffee table.</p>
<p>“Answer me,” he says.</p>
<p>“I’ve seen the trial, Leon.”</p>
<p>“What about when you were at Umbrella? Did you know then?”</p>
<p>In a half-second glimpse, she recognizes the look on his face. The one from the laboratory bridge after he’d revealed her betrayal. The anger is gone, replaced by a candlelit sadness burning itself out. He hasn’t slept. She can tell from the deepening color on his eyelids.</p>
<p>“I didn’t know,” she says sadly. “Umbrella kept many things well hidden, even from me. I didn’t know.”</p>
<p>He nods, staring disconnectedly at the floor like he doesn’t know what to do with this knowledge, resigned to the fact that it changes nothing anyway. Now it is her turn to be honest. The truth rises from a place below her heart, up and up like a wave, and it is frightening. It’s not that she has anything to lose in telling him this, but moreso that she will be changed, something in their relationship will change, and she will need to find herself again. She leads him to the couch and sitting down, begins to tell him about John.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>His office was red hardwood floor, a polished oak desk and bookshelves lined with heavy texts on biology. An arched window overlooked the parking lot and it was her favorite view. When Ada sat in his chair, she would admire the tree-lined streets, the scattered leaves, the asphalt, the sky, freeze-framing the shot in her mind to recall for later.</p>
<p>They had met in the unremarkable way most work couples do, with communal kitchen and water cooler small talk, but mostly it was because her boss, the VP of Umbrella, needed John’s signature on paperwork and she became the messenger. She didn’t mind rushing up and down the stairwells. In fact, she looked forward to it. It had been months since her sister’s death and she had forgotten what ease and comfort felt like. What joy felt like.</p>
<p>Sometimes he came to her desk, saving her the trip. She freeze-framed every part. Sunlit blonde hair that turned brown in the rain. Dark eyebrows, hazel eyes, the pretty creases underneath them when he laughed. His knee-length white lab coat which she had never found sexy on anyone before, but it suited him well. She slipped her hand into it once, dropped a note she had written on a pink memo sheet with her email address and phone number, lipstick-kissed. Soon she and John were taking their lunch hour together, hands hallway-brushing as they walked, sharing the minutiae of their days. Everyone but the cleaning staff knew.</p>
<p>He had been divorced eight months. No children. Whenever she was lonely and overcome with grief, she’d spend lazy, movie-filled nights in his Tudor style home, draped in one of his sweaters. Later, as a spy working under coercion, those nights turned restless. He took her sudden interest in his work as a sign of love.</p>
<p>John had an open heart. It was something she secretly adored and envied. There was nothing he wouldn’t tell her.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>“He asked me to marry him one day while we were out in his garden. There was nothing showy about it. We were planting hyacinths. He asked me right then and there.” Ada wells up at the memory and covers her face. As if sensing a need for help, Mira rests her fluffy head on Ada’s lap and it is immediately comforting.</p>
<p>“What did you say?” Leon asks.</p>
<p>“What did you think I said? My handlers saw romantic partners and families as collateral. And by then, I’d gotten almost everything I needed from him. I said no to keep him safe.”</p>
<p>“I’m so sorry.”</p>
<p>“He was so unhappy at Umbrella. I saw it, and I used that to get his help.”</p>
<p>Leon turns to her, the swift realization calling back the night they met. He hadn’t been the only person she’d lied to about exposing Umbrella together.</p>
<p>On TV their indistinct shapes waver and shrink. She touches his forearm, relieved when he lets her. “I can’t undo what I did and what I put you through. That I have this new life doesn’t change any of that. But I want to help you get her back.”</p>
<p>He turns his palm over and his skin is damp and cool. All those lifelines branching out, little hashmarks and braids trailing off to form new shapes beneath her own. She laces their fingers, past-present-future. He squeezes.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Before Raccoon City, she spent months dreaming of how to bring a person back from the dead. Threading needle through skin, hair, bone and teeth. Imagined a fish net spread across the East River, arms open at the moment of her sister’s falling and Ada would have said <em>catch</em>, said <em>there</em>, as if it could be that simple.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>The minutes pass with the slowness of a crack forming across a bed of ice. The swell of the river pushes through and Ada swears she can hear it, the gurgle of water like a voice heard from beyond layers of glass. She can’t make out the words. She is feeling very heavy. She is very tired. Leon puts his arms around her, nose up against her neck, and the suddenness of the gesture jolts her back to the present.</p>
<p>Four walls. Floor, cherry hardwood. The ground is not a bridge that is falling. They have crossed it and they are here now. She recites the world as it appears. She finger combs his hair, the way she does when they wake up in bed together. The memory stirs something in Ada, a thirst warming to an ache, and she lets herself fall back to the couch, holding on to the sure weight of his body.</p>
<p>Touch, that was the key to open her up. All those years learning English for survival, but the body had its own peculiar language, strange and wondrous. When her speech halted, she likened it to stop-motion music videos. Because there was music in her body, those small increments of change, stop and start. He kisses her palm and then the tips of her fingers, her wrist, her mouth. Her mouth and then her fingertips.</p>
<p>With her eyes closed, Ada drifts upwards. She imagines the glittering surface of a river from a great height.</p>
<p>Gingerly, Leon rubs the pearl buttons on her cardigan. His body is pressed so close she can feel him growing hard, a slight pulse against her thigh, but she doesn’t mind. He is studying her intently now. What does he see when he looks at her? What kind of person could she be?</p>
<p>She lifts a hand to his eyes. Spreads her fingers. Forms an animal grasp, barely skimming his face. <em>I could hurt you</em>, she doesn’t say, but he just smiles, nudging her hand aside for another kiss.</p>
<p>“Where are you going?” he asks. “I’m trying to look at you.”</p>
<p>“Why?”</p>
<p>“Because you’re pretty. I like seeing your face.”</p>
<p>“Shut up,” she whispers, raking his hair to the side. He is old Hollywood handsome, Hiroshima-Mon-Amour handsome. She does not have the words for what he does to her.</p>
<p>“You know what, just to spite you now, I won’t stop saying it. You’re beautiful,” he says. “End of story.” Another kiss, this one slow as a leaf turning itself toward the sun. Unfold, open.</p>
<p>“Tu me détruis,” she says, heart racing.</p>
<p>“Is that what you want?”</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>“What else?” he says, tracing waves on her bare stomach. “What else do you want me to do?”</p>
<p>Before she can give him a sexy answer, her stomach growls, reminding her of the uneaten take-out and uncooked rice. Hearing his laugh makes her feel like a child. She can see the boy he must have been, curious, tender-hearted, and it makes her laugh from joy.</p>
<p>“To be continued,” he says, straightening his shirt and helping her up.</p>
<p>“Did you still want to cook tonight?” she asks.</p>
<p>“Yeah. I mean, if you want, I can take over. Just tell me what to do.”</p>
<p> “No. We’re a team,” she says. “We do this together.” Leon follows her to the kitchen, his dog trailing behind with her nose to the air. They could make something good.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I notice I am happiest with this fic when I write what I love, no matter how ordinary and small it feels sometimes. I'm not the kind of writer who deals in action-packed dramatic plots and that's okay! There are other things I can do well. And each time, I can try to do better.</p>
<p>Last month I had a small love story published in Fractured Lit. I'm still overwhelmed by the positive reception it got. You can <a href="https://fracturedlit.com/cavero/">read it here</a> &lt;3.</p>
<p>I hope you're safe and okay. I hope you're getting through the days however you can.</p>
        </blockquote><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This is my first fanfiction and I have not been able to stop writing about these two since quarantine started. Send help. Also, thank goodness for music which has kept me afloat in so many ways. I made a playlist for Leon and Ada <a href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0WQcBwHdf1B7CKe8jXXEPY?si=EpXQM-JeRlSDvbiBigDoTQ%22">here on Spotify</a>. The title is from a song by the band Slowdive.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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